When the going gets tough, the tough go... dumpster diving.

Sometimes I hate posting, these days, because my days are pretty much the same as the one before it. We don't go that many places, or when we do, it's still sort of the same thing--the family thing, usually, or shopping, or similar. But something a little unusual happened to me today, and I can pretty much guarantee that it is something that you haven't heard today:

I got caught dumpster diving by the pastor of my church this morning.

I am still kind of shocked by the "I went dumpster diving" portion of this message.

Okay, here's what happened. I got a Freecycle email this morning offering a small list of toys, including a few Little People stuff. Kiddo has more Little People stuff than she needs, of course, but she still plays with them in conjunction with her Polly Pocket/Disney princess dolls now. She has a little table that is dedicated to them. This was one of those "will be sitting outside, come get it before we dispose of it" sort of emails, and it was located on the next street.

Now, folks who live in cities might not understand this, but those of us in rural areas do not walk to the next street. There are no sidewalks made for walking, so you have to walk in people's gras or on the road. Our other car is in the shop, though, so we have no vehicle today. And so I thought... this is a relatively close place. I've walked down to that area once or twice in the past--I walked down part of the way there to vote once, with Evie in the mei tai, and it took about twenty or thirty minutes, round trip. (Was really proud of that one.) Surely I could grab a few reusable shopping bags and set out with my four-year-old on a morning walk! It's not too hot and we wouldn't be gone too long and we would get some excercise and it would definitely be something unusual to do on a day when we can't really go anywhere else anyway! What could possibly go wrong!

So we get there, and the brainiacs have put all sorts of stuff, clearly yard sale leftovers, out at the curb, alright--they had put it with their regular trash. Most of it was bagged up, even. I poked around for a second, looking to see if one of the big black bags had the toys they had mentioned and quickly decided that they'd already been taken--there were some toys, but they were trashy or broken, or one that was too large to carry. Since I was there, I grabbed a plastic shopping basket, a bag of seashells (E loves sea shells) and an aluminum table from the edges of their mess, avoided the flies as best as I could and set out home again. The table is maybe five feet long and two feet wide, but was light enough that I didn't see a problem with carrying it home.

So there I was, table in my right hand, shopping bags over my left arm and carrying a dingy shopping basket with sea shells in the other, corraling a preschooler up the road (and in the grass--these two roads have no shoulder, either, so the pavement ends at the edge of the lane and then there's grass--so I was using the front part of the table to make sure she was pushed into place.) and do we all know how fast small kids walk when there's nothing exciting to do at the end of the walk, and they're setting the pace? We're trudging uphill, within sight of our house, when my neighbor pulls out of his driveway. I drop the table and give him a wave, thinking that I really didn't wish to be seen carrying home a bunch of junk but okay. And then I look up and see a man walking down the road, on the other side, towards us. We get closer and I realize that... it's the pastor of the church we're going to.

It is hard not to notice the bags and shopping basket and gigantic table--let's call it "retro" because that makes it sound cool and not like a piece of junk--that I am lugging up the road.

So we stop and have an awkward conversation about why I am carrying home someone's trash, and he goes on his way down the road for a pastoral visit, and I return home to deposit my trash-to-treasure. You know, I could sit here for half an hour, watching the road, and see maybe ten cars go up or down, and people on foot? I might see that once every two months, if that. The day that I am out being a public menace, that's the day that he decides to walk down the street to visit with someone? So unfair.

Oh, and by the way? After I got home, I re-read that original freecycle email again. There was a line at the bottom that I'd missed the first time around. You know what it said? The toys would be sitting outside the garage for pickup. Outside. The. Garage. Not by the road. Not with the trash.

So, yes. I actually did paw through someone's trash without permission.

And no, I am not going to walk back down there. Once was more than enough. :)