“That was right on my bins”

How often do you think about trash?

The last time I thought about trash was trying to figure out what it meant when Mrs. Hudson had a body fall on her trash cans during an episode of “Sherlock.” Brits call trash cans, “bins” and she lamented that hers were now destroyed. Around here, we have new “bins” to use.

For almost four years I’ve schlepped my trash to the dump or pawned it off on good-natured friends and relatives. From today on, the only schlepping we’ll be doing is to take the new 90-gallon trash cans supplied by Mountain Waste out to the road.

With a full house I have more trash. There’s more meals to cook, more personal items, more trash, more of everything. Items such as clothing goes to either Goodwill or Savers where they give you a 20 percent off coupon for your next purchase but trash is trash.

The other day I started my car while it was still dark and when my headlights came on I noticed a big, smeary smudge of snot on the glass door. Something had been nosing around looking for the source of the bag of lusciousness sitting in the mudroom. I’d rather have to worry about the honor of a trash can than have something hungry break into the house. I’d hate to shoot a bear that’s inside the house and accidentally hit the drywall I spent so much money repairing.

Another relief is the tediousness of sorting paper, plastic, glass, cans and whatever into an assortment of ratty containers. Now, all recycling goes into one single container all mashed together like a paper/plastic salad. The only problem I see is that every container will need a washing before it can go outside. Bears can smell a temping, rotting odor from miles away and I don’t need to attract a huge bruin to sup in my recycling can.

The upside is that I will finally get to use my Division of Wildlife rubber shot on some marauder but I’m worried I’ll miss and put a dimple of dents in one of the cars.

The one problem that I now have is how to get enough newspaper for the hamster cage and to start a fire in the woodstove. It’s a kind of a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot result of canceling my Denver Post subscription. To get papers, I fish around the big paper recycling container and steal other people’s newspaper but now I may have to resort to begging from neighbors like a beggar asking for money for booze. I’d rather beg than buy newspapers than pay a rude delivery person and substandard customer service personnel offered by the Denver Post.

I feel like I’ve become an honest person since i don’t have to ask Paul to take trash to his old apartment complex and dump it there. Once he forgot a bag in his trunk and discovered it three weeks later, much more fragrantly foul and wretched.

The fee isn’t too bad; $75 each quarter and they supply the cans on wheels. Each Wednesday they pick up my trash and every other week the recycling. I was spending $7 to haul trash and recycling in my car and think of the savings on air fresheners.

I’ve been leery of having trash cans ever since my upstairs duplex neighbor, “The Mattress” would place aging trash in the can the day after trash day and she was surprised when bears would come to feast on her smelly leavings. The duplex in Pine was 880 square feet of hell from above coming from the long queue of randy suitors that paraded through her bedroom. She was probably too busy with her social calendar to realize the repercussion of putting out trash the day after it was picked up the day before. What would you expect from a woman that uses cheap condoms and would line her bedroom wall with doorstops to keep the constant pounding her headboard from awakening the neighbors. I helped her pick up her trash once but the combination of fish bones and condom wrappers rather put me off.

The first week of trash collection went without incident and though I’m sure we’ll have midnight visitors trying to get at the bacon wrappers, leftover pasta salad and Mountain Dew bottles.

I’m very sure I won’t have any bodies falling on my “bins.”