It is finished

or, what will I write about now?

[Note: Marv agrees to share today’s header photo with this pair hanging out on a neighbour’s roof this afternoon. Don’t ask me what the one on the right is up to.]

**

Patch by meticulous patch, the alley has been tarmacked. Yesterday, looking out the window, I realized that bright yellow lines had appeared sometime since I last looked, one on each side of the road. It’s actually kinda cute, when you consider how truly narrow this alley is in some places; when seen from above the rich black of the paving and the bright-from-the-can-fresh yellow road paint made it look like one of those children’s village playmats.

The only thing to mar the beauty: the large heap of garbage.

How trash is processed here depends very much on which part of town you live in. When I moved into my last place, the area was so sparsely built up that the garbage service hadn’t put it on their route yet, and my landlady had to get in touch with them to set it up. They came semi-regularly there, blowing the ubiquitous whistle and collecting the refuse house-by-house.

Here, it’s another story. For one thing, the end of the alley, where it switches from marg to galli, is simply not wide enough for a four-wheeled vehicle. There are also multiple, even tinier, dead-end alleys that branch off our “main” one.

So the system here’s a little different. The garbage truck is quite large, and at times it gets reversed all the way down the alley only to drive straight out once loaded up, other times it’s the reverse (literally). At the sound of the whistle, everyone brings out their garbage; more recently, recyclables are sorted into large sacks in the truck bed.

All in all, it’s been a very efficient system, especially in recent months: rather than not knowing what day or time the whistle would blow, as has often been the case in the past, the truck makes an appearance twice a week, almost always very early in the morning.

The early risers—and let’s be honest here, that does not usually include me, historically a run-down-the-stairs-when-the-whistle-goes kinda gal—preemptively lug bags and boxes to the unoffically designated spot not far from my building door. We are well trained.

This Monday, however, the truck failed to make an appearance, probably because of the remnants of roadworks vehicles accumulated at the drive-in end of the road—driving in on four wheels, that is.

So there the garbage sat, all day, and then yesterday the bright yellow lines got painted around it. I thought the heap might sit there till the next appointed day, but a couple of hours later, the truck showed up, with much less whistle-blowing than usual because that pile was quite enough, thank you very much.

By evening the rain was pouring, as it did for much of this morning, washing the brand-new pavement and erasing evidence of the garbage pile.

Years from now, archaeologists—or more realistically, just someone new to the neighborhood—may spend an hour attributing meaning to that gap in the yellow paint. If they are anything like me.