Trash talking

"What an amazing coincidence," I tell my husband. "Ludington is having their spring clean up the weekend that you'll be there hunting for morels."

"Let me guess. You want me travel 2,000 miles so I can trash pick windows?"

"Please?"

My husband is leaving to go to Ludington this weekend to spend a few days combing the woods for morel mushrooms. This is an annual outing for him and he's looking forward to the trip. Maybe he'll be lucky and find lots of fungi. He's bringing his GPS unit to be sure of hitting every one of his secret spots in the woods. Last year he forgot to take it and he's sure he missed finding the morel motherlode for that reason. I'm glad he's going, but not because of mushrooms. It's spring clean up time in Ludington and he's promised to bring me back some trash.

In Ludington in the spring people put out all the bulky items that aren't allowed during the rest of the year. This is the signal for flat beds and pick up trucks to crawl along the streets, looking for free stuff on the curb. When we lived in Ludington it was a bigger deal than Easter. We'd pack up the kids, the dog and Grandma in whichever vehicle had the most storage capacity and drive up and down the streets of Ludington, looking for treasure. Once we brought home a heavy old cash register, a big brass one with a segmented drawer on the bottom and numbers that popped up behind the glass along the top. The kids played store with it for a year and then we put it out on our own curb during the following spring clean up, tired of barking our shins on it in the living room. I like to think that it's entertained eight or nine other famlies with small, button-pushing children since then, endlessly rescued from and discarded on a different curb every spring.

We used to take the opportunity provided by spring clean up time to empty our own house of old computer parts, building materials and things that were one or two parts shy of being garage sale fodder.

I wasn't sure of the proper etiquette during those times when I'd be outside hauling things to the street and someone would pull up to look over my castaway items. Should I greet the lookers with a "Hi, how are you?" and an offer to help them load up or would that be embarrassing? Would acknowledging their presence drive them away like startled deer caught in mid-forage? Maybe they'd prefer it if I just pretended they weren't there at all.

I settled this the way I usually do, by not quite doing one thing or the other. I'd wave a little, smile a lot and fade back to the house to watch from behind the living room curtains, commenting under my breath. "Yes! They're taking the couch! Hey, hey, hey! What about that piece of countertop over there? C'mon, buddy. You know you want it. Yes! It's history! It's outta there!"

I'm a rubbish picker, a rag puller and a dumpster diver from way back. Along the window sill in my office lie trophies accumulated during neighborhood walks: a Fiona head, some wire, a chewed up scoop, a rubber heart that says "Barbie" on it, a green plastic lizard, and a purple bird-shaped cookie cutter. Once I found a heavy buck knife and I picked it up thinking my husband might like it. A few steps farther on I found the sheath for it. I decided it had probably belonged to a teenager. They tend to congregate along the ditches down here at night, drinking their parents' Natural Light and casually boinking in the bushes. I felt no guilty twinges for taking the knife home, figuring a slew of flyers saying "FOUND: BIG FAT KNIFE - CALL TO IDENTIFY" posted on telephone poles would net me a whole lot more trouble than I cared to endure.

There isn't a spring clean up in Jacksonville. People don't put out trash down here, they sell it. Recently I've been scanning the roadside for wood windows. I need them to paint pictures on to sell at an art fair that's coming up. They're amazingly difficult to find around here and it's particularly galling to know that I used to pick up old windows by the boatload every spring in Ludington for free. Unfortunately, down here they're considered vintage and priced accordingly.

I visited a salvage place called Burkhalter's last weekend looking for some single pane wood sashes, lured by the pictures of cement elephants, rows and rows of pink and blue toilets and demolition slide shows on their website. They're located right in the middle of old Jacksonville, about a half hour north of where I live. I found windows by the hundred there, years of dust on them, most of the glass broken, covered with dirt and grime, stacked upright in an old shed that my son, who was with me, declared too creepy to enter.

Starting price for these crumbling beauties was $20 each with additional numbers of panes adding to the total. I asked the guy minding the store to cut me a deal on four and he nearly choked. Obviously he was very attached to them.

I miss spring clean up in Ludington -- the air of anticipation, the annual appeal in the newspaper asking people not to put stuff out until the night before their scheduled pick up date, the cars full of avid treasure seekers, necks craning out the windows, pulling over to grab a lawn chair or two, only to exchange them on the next block for a better looking pair on another pile.

But most of all I miss getting enough raw material to keep me chin deep in art projects for the rest of the year in exchange for a few hours driving up and down the streets. Last week I caved and bought enough windows to see me through the art fair but it's not the same. There's something addictive about finding cool and funky junk and turning it into cooler and funkier art. It's the thrill of the hunt mixed in with my natural cheapskate tendencies that makes me do things like ask my husband to look for trash for me while he's on vacation. Any normal person would be happy with a postcard, although if he happens to find cool ones in a pile somewhere, I hope he'll bring them back. I need some for a decoupage project and free's a great price.