Welcome to My Yard

So welcome to my yard. After doing my gazillionth litter pickup from my front lawn since the husband and I moved into this house about 6.5 years ago, I started thinking about some of the bizarre and nasty sh*t I've had to dispose of over the years, for people who found it way too taxing to just keep their crap inside their car and find a proper receptacle later. Yes, we live right beside a fairly busy highway, and there's a sidewalk for the pedestrianally inclined, so I suppose a little garbage comes with the territory, but still. What line of thinking is a person following when they decide that somebody else needs to deal with their (sometimes quite personal) trash?

A few of our most memorable discoveries from days past: condoms (of course), bad class photos circa 1986, court documents, and approximately 13 bottles that had previously contained Mad Dog/Wild Irish Rose-caliber hooch (all found under one magnolia tree...why weren't we invited to that party?).

Now, sure, maybe we're a little more environmentally aware than some others in our rural NC county, and we're generally pretty law-abiding. To that end, I looked up the official anti-litter law, General Statute 14-399, for our state:

14-399. Littering. (a1) No person, including any firm, organization, private corporation, or governing body, agents, or employees of any municipal corporation shall scatter, spill, or place or cause to be blown, scattered, spilled, or placed or otherwise dispose of any litter upon any public property or private property not owned by the person within this State or in the waters of this State including any public highway, public park, lake, river, ocean, beach, campground, forestland, recreational area, trailer park, highway, road, street, or alley...

 The punishment to fit the crime? If you're busted chucking out stuff that weighs less than 15 pounds, you can get a fine of up to $100 and also potentially enjoy 4 to 12 hours of community service, preferably picking up litter. That would be pretty good justice in my book, but not sure how supportive the prison administrations are of that since I imagine they're turning a tidy profit from renting out inmates to do lots of our state's highway cleanup.

But I digress. The point of this blog is to share the discoveries we make in our yard. See anything that once belonged to you? You're welcome to come and retrieve it from our trash or recycling bins. Just don't do it again. I'm not your mother.