Taking out the trash

When I moved into my present apartment I bought an outdoor trash can and placed it behind the house. 

I only generate about one very small bag of trash a week, so I seldom used it, but a young woman moved in shortly after that and she used it frequently.  I didn't mind after I realized she put loose garbage in it.  I knew I wasn't likely to use it again.

She slowly commandeered all the other trash cans behind the house, including the ones without tops and garbage began spilling over onto the parking lot.  We thought the problem would be solved when garbage day rolled around.

Only she missed it, or so we thought.

She seemed like a nice, if slightly full of herself, young woman who only took out the trash, or parts of it when the spirit moved her.  It moved her less and less over time.  In self defense the rest of us did various things to preserve our living space.

This winter when snow filled the parking lot, the urban sculpture in our lot froze to the ground in an odd arrangement of cans, rugs, and other less desirable things.  In what I suppose was a cleaning frenzy she began sweeping the litter in her kitchen out the inside door to the landing between our two apartments and leaving the dryer lint in the basement on the floor.  I had become a personal sanitation engineer.

Yesterday I noticed an entire set of living room furniture piled by the street.  The sprawl of junk in the back lot increased and I was ecstatic! That meant only one thing to me.

Someone was finally taking out the trash!

They picked her up at eight o'clock this morning.