dumpsters

Sometimes I root for the squirrel

/ sweetsaraline / 1 Comment

A squirrel rests on its haunches next to a dumpster in the elementary school parking lot one morning when my son is still small. It has found a cherry danish, and what a find it is. The danish is almost as big as the squirrel. It clutches either side of this special treat with its two front paws. Its paws are getting sticky from the sugary glaze, but it is an uncultured rodent, so the squirrel doesn’t care. It nibbles on the cherry danish happily.

We hear a “Ssssscreeeeeeeee!” from the sky, like a pterodactyl announcing its presence in a dinosaur movie. There is an answering chorus of “Scree! Scree!” I look up to see a flock of seagulls coming for the squirrel with the cherry danish.

The squirrel sees them, too. It pauses for a couple of seconds so it can look at the seagulls in terror, and then it drops on all fours and runs with the very in-demand pastry grasped in its teeth.

My son and I cheer the squirrel on as we watch it running for its life across the parking lot and school yard. The shadow from the flock follows menacingly. And they’re gaining, they’re gaining, and—

The squirrel runs up a tree.

Maybe you’re thinking that a tree doesn’t seem like the best place to escape from a flock of birds, but this flock of birds has webbed feet that cannot cling to branches. All the seagulls can do is land on the ground next to the tree and look around angrily while the squirrel enjoys its hard-won cherry danish.

It’s a dumpster thing

/ sweetsaraline / 2 Comments

If you ever rent a dumpster for a home renovation or a big clean up project, then you need to know about what will inevitably happen. Dumpsters are notorious for getting filled with random junk from anonymous neighbours overnight. When people see a dumpster in front of someone else’s house, they just have to throw all their garbage into it. They just can’t help it. It’s a thing. It will happen and you can’t stop it.

“That won’t be a problem for me,” you scoff. “The dumpster that I’m going to rent has a lid with a lock.” I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it won’t help. People will still come with their bug infested mattresses and failed pallet-furniture projects sometime between midnight and 5 am, and when they find that the dumpster is lidded and locked, they’ll just lean these items against the dumpster for you to find in the morning. That is to say, they’ll lean their things against the dumpster if they’re in a charitable mood. It is more likely that they’ll toss their heavy garbage items on top of the lid, making it impossible for you to open it without moving them first.

The layperson who rents a dumpster is typically shocked and upset to find the dumpster that arrived the day before already filled in the morning. After all, they paid money to get this dumpster into their driveway because they had a specific use for it, and now they can’t put their specific rubbish in the dumpster because there is no longer enough room. Construction workers, on the other hand, are never surprised. It is well known in the construction industry that this is a thing. Usually construction companies allow for extra dumpsters in their budget when they have a project.

And how do I know about the dumpster thing? My husband works in demolition. One day he returned to a job downtown early in the morning and the dumpster was full of mannequins. Their neutral faces stared at him and past him and towards the bottom of the dumpster. Toeless feet pointed towards the sky, and thin, hard arms and legs jutted out everywhere like sticks in a broken bird’s nest.