Excerpt: Bus Stop to Nowhere

My grandmother told me a lot of things when I was a little girl and it pains me to admit that very few of them stuck in my head. One of them was that you should always take the garbage out when the container is about three-quarters full. The reason is if you let it get all the way to the top then people keep putting more in and mashing it down and then they put more in and don’t mash it down and the next thing you know there’s spaghetti noodles hanging over the edge and peas have dropped out of the can that was propped on top and the floor gets sticky and it all goes to hell in a handbasket. (Did you know that saying goes all the way back to the French Revolution?)

The other reason is that sometimes the people will just start a new garbage container next to the first one and then you’ve got to take that one out too and now you’re making several trips. Grandma was very particular about having to make extra trips to do anything and that especially meant taking out the garbage and I think that was on account of her grandmother was taking out the garbage when she disappeared. It wasn’t like she ran off or was kidnapped. What happened was a sink hole or maybe some kind of negative space opened up right in front of the back steps where they met the walk that went around the house. Great-great Grandma had already carried out a couple of bags of garbage but she hadn’t been keeping up with taking it out so there were several more bags that needed to be taken out and one of my Great-great Aunts was just sticking her head out the back door to ask where on earth the pickled green beans had gotten to and there was a “whoosh” and my Great-great Grandma was gone. They said the bag of garbage she was carrying hung in the air for a full minute before it followed her down. Then the ground closed up and she and the garbage were gone and everybody else just had to carry on without her. Unfortunately, that meant taking the rest of the garbage out the long way- through the front door, down the steps and all the way around the house- and they never did find out what had become of the pickled green beans.