Freed from the Garbage Demon

I have been a prisoner to garbage ever since the flood.

I was ready for a dump run when the Barton Transfer Station was wiped out. I fact, I even drove around checking with flooded-out folks to pick up their trash before driving to Barton. I don't know what I was thinking...of course the transfer station was right in the flood zone. I arrived to a locked gate and a scene of total destruction.

The transfer station will not be re-opening. Locations were set up for flood debris, and you could also pile flood debris alongside the road. They finally set up a dumpster for bagged/tagged trash for residents.

But what was I to do with my zillions of small bags of cat litter? To pay by the bag would be costly, and it's not like you can load up a grocery store garbage bag with more than one cat box worth of litter. I already had a full car load at the time of the flood, with more being generated every day. My first call for a dumpster was also costly -- $115 a month, which is about twice what I paid when transporting it myself. A less-expensive company wasn't sure I was in their operating district.

But they checked, and hallelujah, I now have a dumpster and trash pick up for only around $65 a month. I'm not thrilled about having a dumpster in my yard, but then I'm also not thrilled about having a mountain of bagged cat litter in my locked chicken coop (no fear, there are no chickens in the coop).

The garbage situation has been haunting me. I imagined the headlines: "Investigators say there was a mountain of garbage in the cat lady's barn." You can double-bag cat litter and stack it as neatly as you want, and lock it up in a vermin-proof area, and it's still a mountain of garbage.

I could have paid someone to haul it away, but I worry when working via online classifieds that the trash could end up tipped off a roadside in a state forest somewhere. I want my trash to disappear via professional means.

So that's one less stress in my life, and for not much more than I already paid. I no longer will have to return to my pre-flood ritual of giving up my Saturday mornings for a trash run, and I no longer have to load up my Kia Soul with trash bags.

I'll bet the dumpster business is booming. Either that or there are a lot of other barns in Tioga County with garbage mountains.