Metamorphosism

It was muggy yesterday

Took some stuff to the dump yesterday because it's open late Thursdays, until seven in the evening. Got home late from work because traffic was heavy, loaded up the old Dobló, which we had borrowed from my father-in-law the retired mechanic and drove to the dump.

Much of the drive was spent stuck behind a truck loaded with large odd things. When I finally passed it, a tractor pulling a huge load of hay had just pulled out in front of it and so I was sandwiched in between the two. The tractor turned off after a while and I drove the rest of the way to the dump, arriving there at one after seven. At that point, I didn't know yet that the dump was open until seven (which was good, because think how nervous I would have been); all I knew was that it was open late Thursdays. But the sign said 19.00. The dashboard clock said 19.01. Which explained why things were so quiet at the dump.

The dump lady at the gate let me in anyway. She usually tries to cultivate a hardass attitude when I see her on Saturdays, which are busier, but I suspect she's actually nice at heart. Working with refuse does that to women.

She told me where to toss my cardboard and where the milk cartons and juice cartons go and where the plastic, although I already knew all that. She actually has a house at the dump, the stairs up to the door are covered with stacks of various things salvaged from the dump.

I went around throwing everything in the proper containers because I didn't want to get yelled at.

Throw the metal garbage way back into the metal garbage dumpster, she said. It's nearly empty. So I threw the screens left over from the first tortoise habitat, which we dismantled when we moved the tortoise to the big flowerbed in front of the house.

Then I removed the swingset parts, long tubes of metal painted green with red accents, and threw them in, clear to the back of the dumpster, one by one. For each one, I made a trip from the back of the car to the dumpster and threw it towards the right-rear corner, using an underhand throw.

There was a single swing, a two-seated swing, and a different two-seated swing. There were four leg tubes in all, which when the swingset was standing connected in inverted V-shapes at each end of the swingset, and there was a slightly larger tube that went along the top of the swingset, connecting the two inverted V-shapes at their apexes, from which the various swings had hung. The rope ladder I disposed of in a different dumpster, the one for rope ladders.

I was in no hurry to throw all that shit away, but it had to go. No one was swinging on it anymore and it was just taking up space in the yard.

Then I threw away bottles and cans and went and got the kids at their grandparents and went home. It got dark and the moon was full and Alpha and I put the kids to bed and went into the backyard and killed a bottle of prosecco and talked. There was a partial eclipse of the moon and we looked at that a bit and called the kids out to look at it too. It was one of your nicer partial lunar eclipses, big harvest moon and all.

Eating some manufactured ice cream product this afternoon on my way back from the store on my lunch break, I tried to remember the very last time I had pushed a child on a swing at that swingset and I am sad to say I couldn't.

Can you imagine?

That's why I don't say No to my kids as often as I should. Because there you are, pushing them on the swing and you think you're just pushing a kid on the swing, who cares, it's going one of two ways, either you're looking at your watch and saying Just ten more pushes, honey and they say, No twenty, or you're saying Hang on tight, let's see if I can make you spin all the way around and they're squealing with delight. Either way, you're doing this and it is the last time and you don't know it.