Beauty on the Backroads

We live on a road where cars and trucks take the curve with two tires over the center line, speed limits ignored except when there is snow or ice and sometimes not even then. Sometimes a car will disregard the school bus’ stop sign, so much in a hurry or maybe just distracted. So many places to be and anything that delays is an inconvenience at best. 

Lowe’s is nearby so sometimes the cars are loaded down almost beyond their capacity with lumber or new appliances or other building supplies. We watch as arms hang outside of windows holding whatever is strapped to the roof, as trucks pulling trailers bounce into the potholes with a crashing sound that makes us all look up from whatever we’re doing.

Sometimes we are the recipients of “gifts”–building materials or boxes that stray from the vehicle they were in and land in our front yard or sometimes in the middle of the road. On a windy day, garbage from God-knows-where finds its way into our yard. I once found a box addressed to someone in Wilmington, Delaware, which is more than an hour from here. 

The most recent “gift” was a spare tire sitting squarely in the middle of the right-hand land in front of our house. I had taken my daughter to track practice and when I returned home, I saw traffic veering around an object in the road. This has happened before and either I or my husband has removed said object from harm’s way. I didn’t think about it at the time, but my son’s bus was only minutes from traveling this same road and later I could only imagine a bus having to swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid a hazard.

I sighed, knowing what I had to do and not wanting to do it.

—

Why is this my problem?

I’ve never liked cleaning up messes other people have made. If you have ever had small children around, you’ll understand that this was a frustrating part of early motherhood for me. News flash: babies, toddlers, young children all create messes and you have to clean them up! My unreasonable expectations that I could control my life and keep it free of chaos if I was careful to do everything just right were shattered after I became a mother. Even before that, learning to live with another human being (husband) in the same house was a shock to my ordered world. Early in our marriage I noticed every little thing that was out of place or that had been moved. I still do this sometimes, but I don’t think it’s as prevalent as it once was. Maybe I need to ask my husband.

But this reluctance to clean up after other people rises into near-rage when garbage skitters across my lawn. Fast food containers. Water bottles. Cardboard boxes. Plastic bags. They dot the yard, and I groan. Our lawn is nothing noteworthy, but garbage certainly doesn’t belong there. Why, why, why, I whine as I grab a pair of gloves and collect the trash, placing it in the can on our porch.

—

The tire in the middle of the road was a turning point in my thinking.

I stood by the side of the road watching traffic swerve around the tire, waiting for the way to clear. I hoped someone would stop, blocking for me so I could remove the tire from the road. Drivers saw me but they didn’t stop and I realized that the tire wasn’t their problem either. When the way was clear, I stepped into the road and dragged the tire to the side. A few minutes later, my son’s bus arrived at our stop without incident.

I wondered if anyone would come back for the tire. Did they even know it was missing? I asked Phil to move it away from the road before garbage day. I didn’t want it to go to the landfill, and I wasn’t even sure the garbage company would take it. So he pulled it into the yard and propped it up against a tree. We joked about turning it into a planter.

And then he brought home flowers for several of the beds in the yard that I could plant while my parents were in town for Easter. My mom transformed the old tire that was left in the middle of the road into a receptacle to hold the Gerbera daisies.

This is now one of my favorite things in our yard. I can see it from the couch in the living room. It catches my attention from the road.

We took something trash-worthy and turned it into something that holds beauty.

—

“That’s not my job.”

I heard someone say this recently in reference to some trash that was scattered on a lawn in a public place. It wasn’t that person’s job to pick up the trash, and I so badly wanted to ask, “Whose job is it?” just to hear the response. But I kept my mouth shut and thought about the trash that finds its way to my yard. How I’ve thought the same thing: that’s not my job.

I ask myself the same question I couldn’t voice this week: “Whose job is it?”

Right now, the world feels like a gigantic mess that someone else made. (Although if we’re honest with ourselves, we all have contributed in some way to the mess that we see.) I wish I didn’t have to be the one to clean it up. I wish other people could behave responsibly and care about themselves, other people and the environment. 

And I wish I could more clearly see the ways that I leave a mess for other people to clean up.

Not too long ago, on a particularly windy day, our neighbor’s trash can was tipped over into the road, and I saw it as I was coming home from work. It wasn’t my trash can. It wasn’t my problem. But I trudged out to the road and pulled it back in.

Because that’s what neighbors do.

What if we could see the world this way? As good neighbors taking care of each other and the place where we live.

Instead of declaring “That’s not my job” or complaining about having to clean up someone else’s mess, or waiting for someone else to take care of it, what if we looked at the situation anew and asked, “How can I make this better?” “How can I make it beautiful?”

How can we make it beautiful, friends?

Like it or not, it is up to us. Because if it’s not our job, then whose job is it?