Last July while I was walking my dog I watched a man pull up to the lovely, overgrown berm around the corner in a little white pickup with green serif lettering on its doors. He pulled a mower out of his bed, revved it up to a crabby roar and razed all that was green to a flat, sick, brown, buzz-cut. Pollen and dust clouded the street, insects didn't know what to do. I gave him the finger.

Even that meager stretch of earth endured, though. Nobody came back to butcher the plot the rest of summer. Clusters of verdant greenery bloomed untouched, a few feet from parked cars, in beds of dog shit and decomposing Walgreens bags. A lovely and rare sight in a city that pays little heed to the demands of sunlight and water.

Over winter, I watched the cracked and dried stalks poking through drifts, reminding grouchy commuters steadying themselves with outstretched arms and leather-soled shoes over shiny ripples of ice that the world is not dead, just dead tired.

Spring, pissed and cranky, is slow to rouse around here. It sits bolt upright in March, as if waking from a bad dream, then crashes deeper into folds of cold rain and snowflakes for the next month and a half. We shed layers when we know better, pretend it's warmer than it is, watch for the buds on the trees and the dormant grass to grapple and bury the garbage that's settled between rooty knots over the winter.

The berm around the corner was choked with garbage. I listened to hell in my headphones this weekend as I poked it clean with my King Tongs, sidestepping turds and dragging the detritus of American happiness out from the earth that was slowly claiming it. Joyous logos, garish graphics, foil and polyethylene. Plastic straws. Kill plastic.

I filled the dumpster. It took three hours, gray clouds cracking to sunlight. I couldn't imagine a more enjoyable thing to do with my time, head down, working for no man's land, dog hitched to the fence-post, kids on bikes waiting for my back to turn before they tossed their White Castle goblets to the ground.

Labels: garbage, plastic, sadr city