Garbage Blossoms!

There is much to be said about our throwaway culture, our habits of creating messes we can’t or won’t clean up. We move things out of our view here and now, but our descendants seven generations down won’t escape what we have done. I doubt that our own children will.

Just 500 feet down the road from my house. The cemetery clears out all the plastic flowers from the previous summer, and the dumpster overflows. This is what I get to see when I walk the dog, and frankly, I really enjoy it.

But I can’t actually go there right now. I don’t begin to fathom the breadth of that crisis. So I want to appreciate “garbage blossoms.”

Garbage blossoms are piles of trash that teem and overflow. They can be found at festivals and other large public events. Any place that people throw their things, but then the piles aren’t collected often enough. These blossoms can be pretty! A cemetery, a festival, a municipality where the sanitation workers have gone on strike.

I started noticing them a few years ago. If I can set aside my judgments, and my despair, I can appreciate the odd beauty of a mountain of human-made waste. At least we’re concentrating it, and not leaving it spread out all over the place. Though I’m not sure that will make any difference, in the long run.

At the International Ski Jump event outside nearby Westby, Wisconsin.

Orange blossoms on the boulevard, Anytown, USA