LETTERS FROM HOME: WAITING FOR TRASH DAY, HOPING FOR DELIVERANCE

April 10, 1997

Dear Patty,

The good City of Cape Girardeau is going to help everyone do their spring cleaning next week. Men in justly soiled clothes will drop by to pick up all the trash the citizens have deposited by the curb.

But they'll only spend 10 minutes picking up trash at any single residence. Any more trash than that and you deserve to live with your excesses for another year, I guess.

Below our bedroom window are Appalachian piles of limbs that fell from the aging trees in our yard over the winter. Leaves I meant to rake in the fall. A ripped plastic kiddie pool Hank and Lucy never took for the cooling oasis we'd imagined.

With some effort, all these will disappear from our yard next week only to reappear at a landfill. Environmentally incorrect, to be sure, but isn't it nice to believe that someone can dispose of our problems for us?

Other things lurking in the back yard shadows are more worrisome. The topless wrought iron table DC scavenged from somebody's spring cleanup trash last year. The cracked marble sink we stealthily rescued from another pile of trash on a midnight run the year before.

They are reminders that subtraction isn't necessarily everyone's spring cleaning goal. DC thinks of other people's junk as mistreated children to be rehabilitated, made useful members of society. A wonderful point of view in theory. In practice, we are experimenting in the evolution of a junkyard.

Who knows what this year's treasure-hunt will bring.

It's just that DC cannot bear throwing things away. She doesn't even like putting anything away. We have a deal. She fills the dishwasher, I empty it.

The psychological underpinnings of this state of affairs are sweetly mysterious to me.

It's believed we marry people meant to compensate for some lack we perceive in ourselves. Perhaps I've been too willing to throw away -- appliances, relationships -- when things stop working.

Our partners also mirror ourselves. The traits we find irritating or can't understand in them are shadows in our own characters we can't quite see.

The only difference, I guess, is what I keep: 25-year-old letters; a Joni Mitchell T-shirt that fit once upon a time. I never look at them. I keep them because I couldn't bear to throw them away.

Cleaning one's room is an act of emptying, one of C.C. Fish's tarot cards says. What's created is space for more awareness. To be more aware is to live more fully. To live more fully is to fulfill, as the Blues Brothers did, this mission from God.

We'll keep that in mind these days when men in soiled clothes and my wife roam the streets.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.