This post is a paean to the dump. I'm sorry, The Environment.

You guys!  I have been to the dump, and it. is. amazing.  This is probably the opposite of the experience environmentalists want me to have, but I am loving the dump.

Ok so this last week I've been helping my professor clean out her basement, and it is a large basement with many rooms and almost no space to move.  THE THINGS!  The boxes of files, the old jolly jumpers, the Halloween decorations in various locations, the CANS OF PAINT.  It was daunting.

We'd been cleaning it for three straight days, and the chaotic mass took on some semblance of organization, but until you start hauling things out it is sort of disheartening to look at your three days' work and see boxes and bags.

We were disheartened.

Thursday morning we loaded up the van with cans of paint, and more paint we'd missed the first time, and bags of garbage which we promptly unloaded so we could load the twenty or so rogue cans of paint we'd found hidden in the crawl space.  And then the garbage and the rusted piping and the jolly jumper etc.

And then we drove to the dump, windows rolled down to keep from suffocating on the paint smell, apologizing to the forest we drove through for bringing gallons of toxic waste to DUMP somewhere in its midst.

The dump is very clearly organized.  Go here.  Turn here.  If you have this, go here.  Approach the scales when the light is green.  And then the man at the scales is all, GOOD MORNING!  Take your garbage up there to that fellow, and he'll tell you where to go from there!

And that fellow up by the bins is all, GOOD MORNING!  Welcome to the dump!  And he has our garbage out of the van and into a bin before we can even breathe, and is all, Take your van back to the scales now (so they can weigh you again and see how much garbage you dumped!  Oh dump, you are so foresighted) and then head over there to recycling!  They will tell you what to do there!

So we head back to the scales and it's only $20 for our load of garbage, and not the hundred-odd-plus we'd been anticipating, and then we head to recycling and pull up to the table marked 'Paint' and we're like, We have an absurd amount of paint?  (It is, apparently, free to dump your household toxins.  Probably to discourage clandestine garbaging of said toxins.  Clever you, dump.)  And the guy helps us cart the 80-ish cans of paint out of the van and shows us where to drop our metal piping and our ancient bottle of Round-Up and our defunct fire extinguisher, and we go on our merry way.

I know the dump is just A Thing That Exists and not the magical experience we'd both felt like we'd had.  Its just, we had all this crap, and now we DON'T have it.  I know a lot of it is just going into a terrible heap and is going to ruin the world for our children's children, but it isn't in the basement any more.  And everyone was so JOLLY and HELPFUL and it was the first sunny day in AGES.

I would visit you again, dump.  You have won my heart.