The Joy of Dumpsters

There's a dumpster parked behind our house right now, and I LOVE it.

Because of all the renovations Matty's done for our house over the past three years, he's had occasion to rent dumpsters before, so I already knew how liberating it is. Now, whenever I see the pile of rotting planks, chunks of plaster, and rusty pipes that signal the imminent arrival of that huge green receptacle, I look around my home with a different sort of eye. I gaze critically at every knick-knack, every chatchke, every accessory - pretty much everything that isn't nailed down - and ask, Do I really need you?

If you've never had a dumpster before, it might surprise you how many things might provoke the answer, No, I really don't need you.

Here are some of the things I tossed this time around: a broken floor lamp; a stained, shredded mattress circa the Reagan administration; a rusty bicycle; a set of 20-year-old encyclopedias; several board games missing half their pieces; about a quarter mile of plastic track that went with a ride-on train that stopped working before Hilary was born.

Don't think I don't realize that we're committing some kind of environmental terrorism every time we fill up a dumpster with a ton of trash and let the dumpster company take it away. Maybe the dumpster company sorts it all out, and recycles anything recyclable, and refurbishes everything refurbishable before donating the items to needy tsunami victims in Malaysia - I sure hope they do that. But even if they don't, even if they just empty the entire dumpster straight into a New Jersey landfill, that still wouldn't stop my occasional purges. Because once in a while, it really helps to lose all that extra baggage, to get rid of all the detritus, to shake yourself free from all the crap that's weighing you down.

Now, it's time to tackle the basement, before I miss my chance . . .