MI DEP 10

My ongoing Jihad Against Clutter has taken me to an extreme I never thought possible. As a child of the Great Lakes State, I always believed that can/bottle deposits were a limitless source of great wealth. I remember joyfully touring the neighborhood on trash day and picking sticky pop* bottles from stinking mounds of garbage. A mere 3 bottle returns was good for a whole candy bar back then. A morning's work could buy a small LEGO set.

Time passed, prices inflated, I moved to stingy 5-cents-a-can MA, and my income rose a bit. It's just not worth the trouble to return bottles anymore. I kept telling myself that I was going to redeem all that glass, which is how I ended up with 5 years of accumulated yuppie ginger beer in my pantry. In the name of Real Estate and the Impossibly Clean Home, they all had to go before this Sunday's open house.

Each overstuffed bag abandoned on the curb felt like a betrayal of my childhood dreams and values. I hope that the little chinese can lady who stumbles across her Big Score appreciates its sentimental value.

* pop (N): soda (syn)