We are almost done with March, maybe the most famous month for wind. There have been a couple of times that our newspaper fell out of the delivery box and the wind fans the pages open. Then, it blows them all over the neighborhood. This morning, I saw a sheet of newsprint blowing down the middle of the street. I could see that it was aged paper but I was still suspicious. While picking it up, I spotted another piece of trash.
Now that the snow has melted away, things caught in a snowbank are left on the ground. I saw a piece of white paper. It was inside the type of small plastic envelope, sandwich size, that we use for various things. I want the yard to look good and I went to pick it up. As I got near, I would see my own handwriting on a letter-sized envelope inside the plastic. It read "Trash Collector".
At Christmas, I like to give the newspaper man, the postman and the trash collector a cash gift. The paper and the postman have a box and I leave the cash there. The trash collector has a large specialized truck that lifts a specially designed trash bin and dumps it into his truck. Then, the lifting arm replaces the bin. I never know just what time the truck is going to come so I tape the envelope with the cash gift on the side of the bin. It was probably about Dec. 27 last year that I put the gift where it has been picked up in other years. I place it where the driver can see there is an envelope on the bin.
What are the odds? The wind and cold work all the time in the winter. The driver can be distracted. People who drive know it is gift time. They can read the envelope. The truck lifts the bin and shakes it twice before putting it down. Excel tells me it has been 94 days since I put that cash outside. There it was today, sealed airtight in its transparent envelope, nice and untouched. A little more drying and the wind would have wisked it way.
