Dumpster Fantasy - December 15, 2019

I was finally getting my entire roof stripped and re-shingled and the contractor had a tiny, tiny dumpster delivered to my yard. Clearly, the volume of material to be stripped would not fit in that little thing but, among asphalt shingles, wood, aluminum and lead flashing, and the workers’ water and soda bottles, I realized, of course! In this day of green building and earth-friendly recycling, there would be a dumpster for each type of material and my yard would be filled with many, many tiny dumpsters. Disappointingly for the sake of the environment, though, thankfully for the sake of my neighborhood, there was only ever one dumpster that everything went into and hauled away, and another (larger one) delivered and hauled away. At the end of the project, just in time before this unusually early snow storm in Boston, I thanked the contractor for excellent workmanship and for providing me with one fleeting, euphoric moment of make-believe that contractors had also begun to recycle.