There’s nothing like hacking at an old tree stump to celebrate spring, all things being new, a religious holiday off from work and school for the family, sunshine on our shoulders, and dirt under our fingernails. To be honest, all that overturned dirt did smell pretty good.
After working on clean-up back in that area for several days, I’ve managed to purge a lot of the nasty trash that has landed there thanks to a significant amount of human effort at laziness. Not to digress, but I mean, when I think about it, I consider all the work that went into piling so much household trash in one place. Namely, along the back fence and in a narrow, long area behind the garage. Why go to so much trouble to heap so much garbage where it really shouldn’t go? As long as you’re bagging it, why not also deposit it somewhere legitimate? Maybe getting a Dumpster or using something called a trash bin would be too much trouble? The city of Springfield couldn’t make it much easier to deliver your trash curbside and have it picked up on a weekly basis. But as I recall, when we moved in last summer, there wasn’t a trash bin at the home, as you might expect for an average home. You figure the previous tenants used the trash bin. But here, no dice… who knows what the previous tenants were up to? Among the household trash I’ve found old syringes, condom wrappers, and broken bottles of whiskey.
But now children live and play here, and we’re cleaning it up. We owe it to them to try to make this place more liveable. Which is why each time I am outside, I am scanning for more broken glass to clean up. We had some gorgeous sunny days in the last week. Our neighbors Jose and Brian, who love to visit after school, came over as usual one afternoon and they were curious about why I had on gloves and was squatting around picking at the grass. Naturally my answer was to go inside, grab three outdoor trash bags, and put the kids to work.
I shared my gardening gloves with them and they had instructions to use the gloved hand to pick up any broken glass. Anything else that looked like trash probably was. Have at it. And they did. At first they all made it into a game. They decided they were prisoners forced into labor. Then that developed into some of them being pilgrims forcing the others, who were Indians, into labor. Then that developed further into being Worm Rescuers. This was after they discovered that there were a lot of worms squirming about in the piles of dirt and trash and the kids decided the worms ought to be relocated to the healthier, cleaner plant beds. (It’s all relative, here, though. Note I don’t say “healthy” or “clean.”) After several successful worm relocations, the Worm Rescue Team had apparently gotten enough of all that and most of them abandoned their plastic trash bags and went to play on the swings instead.
All except Brian. He amuses and interests me because he can sometimes be pretty tough to get to join in an activity, like this spring in our afterschool children’s classes, he often hangs back and is dubious of whatever we may be doing. But when it came to trash pick-up, he was the most willing to hang back from the other kids, this time, and he helped me extensively. In fact he showed me every piece of trash he picked up and he seemed to want to discuss each piece at some length. He would name every piece of trash, ask me to look at it, ask me what it was if he did not know. “Is this glass?” “Yes.” “Is this glass?” “Yes.” “What is this?” “I think that’s glass too.” “Oh. What is this? Paper?” “Yes I think that’s paper.” Long pause. “Eeew. What is this?” “Paper too.” “Oh. Is this glass?’ “Uh-huh.” That went on for a while. It was like a meditation with occasionally squinting at things. I was surprised at how chatty Brian wanted to be. He is often so quiet. Well, except when he’s yelling, which he does a lot. So he is either quiet or yelling and rarely just an even keel. Collecting trash, he seemed to be at peace.
Then there was the children’s class we had indoors this week because of the rain. We made little popsicle people like what Brian is showing in the photo. There were only two adults for the seven kids (instead of having five adults like the previous two weeks) but it worked out fine, since the rain kept our numbers smaller overall.
As we’ve been discussing in previous classes we talked about the unity of the human family in a few different ways. We heard some music and looked at some magazines that show people from around the world. Then we worked on this craft for nearly an hour. The kids loved it.
First they painted their popsicle stick any color. Then they used pipe cleaners for arms, and decorated the sticks with faces and crepe-paper clothing and hair in any colors. Mini umbrellas made perfect accessories. It was great how entertaining and captivating this was for all the kids for such an extended period of time.
Meanwhile, back in the sun, there was this confounding stump. It had a main root that was amazingly thick (given the size of the stump in the first place) and other roots with impressive sprawl and tenacity. River hacked at this thing for a good, long while.
After all the work I’ve been doing in the yard, and with young kids, and trying to manage a lot of them in my yard most days after school, and plucking up trash, and overseeing craft projects and team games and hanging laundry, and pulling annoying weeds and feeling exasperated with how much of a mess the yard is and why did people dump so much trash in it, I can say that it was enormously satisfying to watch someone huff and puff and heave and ho at this really stubborn tree stump. It was the stump’s very resistance, its sense of indignant, proprietary ownership of the very dirt it sat in, the aura of “I belong here, go away,” that made it so very gratifying to watch the spidery, alien-like form of a stump emerge and land with a thunk on the earth next to me.
The kids, out in the yard with us all day long, were interested only to a certain point of, “Wow look at Papa haul off on that thing,” and then it was snack time and any sense of change or progress in the yard was lost to them. In their eyes, the outdoors is a pilgrims-vs.-Indians battle zone, or a pirate ship afloat in a sea of salt water; it’s Camelot; it’s the African savannah; it’s a cottage in a magical forest; it’s hide-and-be-sought; it’s the Arctic circle. It’s anything but work.