Spring Cleaning

We got the first crocuses blooming this week, and it made me feel guilty enough to clean up the yard. The caragana hedge is a magnet for plastic grocery bags. The bags have been used by gleaners to take empty bottles and cans to the bottle depot across the way, and then they're thrown away. It's windy in this part of town, and those bags snag on the thorns of the caragana and the next thing you know they're a greying eyesore.

I deliberately left the mess in the part of the hedge that juts out onto the lot next door. Not very neighbourly of me, I admit. But the man who owns that empty lot hasn't lifted a finger to keep it clean in five years. The city crews who pass by every day on their way into the city central yards - they come out and do a cleanup a few times each summer. And I keep the hedge trimmed at the front because if I don't, the sheltered ell made by the hedge is kitted out to be someone's home.

Don't get me wrong here. I have no objection to people camping out. But this block isn't a safe place for sleeping out of doors at night.

Anyway, today I go out there and one of my neighbours from an apartment down the street is out there on the sidewalk with a shopping cart full of garbage. He's got a pick, and he's picking up all the trash from the empty lot next door.

Lots of the neighbours think we own that lot, but we don't. In the interests of neighbourliness, I thought I'd better let the man know it wasn't MY mess he was cleaning up.

Of course, he was just doing it so he wouldn't have to walk by a mess every day.

"You got a nice place there," he says, nodding at my old house. "Shame to have this mess beside it when you keep it looking so nice."

It does look nice today. The sun is out and glinting on the three glass cloches in the yard, and we have those brave little crocuses, and the rhodos made it through the winter, and the rose canes are showing signs of greening, and I pruned the caragana back hard in the middle of the winter.

I thanked the man. His name is Raymond. And he just wants the street to look nice. But even Raymond has limits.

"Over there," he says, waving at the south side of the street, "they can look after their own garbage. Would you lookit that? Coffee cups, wrappers... I don't mind picking up a few things on this side of the street, especially for the old lady there. But I'm not going across the street."