the 3rd load of the day
There was a time where we believed that everything we buried in the ground would disappear. Very literally. Also very metaphorically. Once our trash has been picked up it’s gone. But it’s not. Most plastic ever made stil exists on the planet. We know it, but somehow we don’t really believe it. Out of sight, out of…
A few weeks ago my partner and I took the wheelbarrow to the back of our rented land. We have done this several times a year since moving here 8 years ago. The practice of burying trash was easy back in the day. Who cared what went on up there in the forest. We have cleared this land of car batteries, toilets, kilometers of rusty fence, buckets, tools, cans, glass and all shapes of plastic.
It is never ending. It is as if the earth turns once a year. Offering our shit back to us. ‘Here, clean up your mess’. We have thought ‘this must be it’ so many times. As it turns out, there are always more surprises. It’s not our mess. We don’t know who turned this beautiful spot into a dumping ground. But we are taking responsibility for undoing it.
Another item that has become part of the tree. On the other side cans have grown into the bark.
The glass could cut animals and kids. They could eat something that was stuck to a plant etc. We both get annoyed as we drag all this stuff out of the forest. Spending days clearing the ground, because other people didn’t know better or didn’t care.
Sometimes people have asked why we’ve done so much to this rented land, especially knowing how little our landlord cares.
The thing is, even with the illusion of ‘my land’ this will always be our shared earth. In that perspective how could we not?
