Today was greenup day.. Its a day when all Vermonters are asked to walk a stretch of road and pick up all the trash they see. It happens the first saturday in may.. after the snow is gone and before the ferns are too high to see the trash

 

.It’s a wonderfull custom .. Our family has been cleaning the same stretch of duxbury road for close to 20 years.. This year diane and I took the garden cart and a bunch of plastic bags and cleared the first half mile of duxbury rd..  By the end of the stretch, we’d completely filled the garden cart with four big bags of trash..

 

It’s an interesting experience.. you can learn much about your neighbors doing this.. We found, for example… that folks seem to be smoking less.. we found far fewer cigarette butts than we’ve ever found before.. We also saw far less junk food wrappers.. and fewer convenience food packages.

also a good sign.. and far fewer beer cans (though bud light still seems to be the beer preferred by litterers) We also found quite a bit more  ‘healthy’ garbage.. Though..the number of folks who eat healthy-ish food and still chuck garbage from their cars is probably pretty low

Todays big surprise was the large amount of single serving wine bottles we found   Most were sutter home Chardonnay..

though we also found some woodbridge..All in all we must have found about 40 of these bottles.. scattered over a quarter mile stretch.. I can only imagine that we’re discovering someone;s  goign home ritual..

Ahh.. another surprise was two golf balls… one of which was even wearing a helmet !

After today, the roads of Vermont will be much closer to pristine again.. someone told me that over two garbage trucks worth of stuff had already been collected by richmond residents by midday.. Even though we were walling in other peoples garbage.. it’s such a nice tradition..

I really love vermont !

 

happy mothers day eve everyone..

 

nite all, nite sam

-me