As a young boy, I spent a fair amount of time
rooting around the weediest yards of my neighborhood. Typically, I was looking for interesting bugs
or just about anything shiny that I might carry away in my pocket. Immediately beyond our neighborhood, back in
a mostly undeveloped place that we called “the grove,” Grover Jones lived in
squalor. I liked his yard best of all.
Cottonwood suckers and current bushes had
volunteered right next to Grover’s paint-peel home. Horseradish and rhubarb grew unchecked. Best of all, for probably the last thirty
years of his life, Grover Jones stopped hauling his garbage to the local dump. Instead, he flung everything he discarded out
the front and side door. I used to go
there mostly to collect the “keys” from discarded sardine cans. Grover Jones ate an inordinate amount of
sardines. The keys were used to peel the
cans open in the days before the invention of flip-top cans. I collected all manner of keys, including
those.
As I dug through the heaps of garbage that Grover
had thrown from his home, I was most stuck by the number of wine bottles. Grover Jones drank a lot of wine. I could not fathom all of that as I waded
through the bottles.
Yesterday, as I looked at my old face in the mirror,
I thought about how heavy with beer and wine bottles my trash liner was when I
pulled it from the can under my sink in the morning. The clinking of the bottles reminded me of
those days outside Grover’s house. And
for the first time in my life I felt I understood Grover Jones.
--Mitchell
Hegman
No comments:
Post a Comment