Reasons: Trash Everywhere

I haven’t been keeping up with my Reasons posts, but believe me, every day I write them in my head. Whenever I trip over something, or can’t find a place to put something, or experience something in the neighborhood that annoys or frustrates me, I tell myself I need to write about it on my blog. That hasn’t happened. I’ll try to be better, starting today.

Park Slope is an expensive neighborhood. And yet it is still full of trash. Some of it is just par for the course with city living, like the bags piled by the curb on trash day. But sometimes those bags break, spilling trash all over the sidewalk. When you have a toddler who likes to spot things on the sidewalk and add whatever it is to whatever collection she’s building, this is just not going to work. I look forward to not having to walk past bags of garbage when we move to the suburbs.

On one particularly outrageous morning at the playground, the playground workers hadn’t yet arrived to empty the trash cans and do a general cleanup, and I kid you not, there was so much trash that it was flying around and hitting children in the head. It was a windy day, and in one corner of the playground—obviously, and of course, the corner Lucia wanted to play in, since it has the best selection of sticks and stones—garbage swirled about like a tornado. Plastic bags. Chip bags. Soda bottles. Napkins. It just seems ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars in rent only to have my child forced to duck from flying debris as she tries to collect leaves. I never noticed how dirty the city was—or, at least, I never really cared—until I had kids and had to interact with the city on a low sidewalk level.