Recycle

Yesterday as I was taking out my roommate’s and my flattened paper, cardboard, and plastic waste to our apartment’s recycling trash cans, I caught myself repeating in my head “reduce, reuse, recycle”.  Why was this on loop in my head acting as a soundtrack for my walk down to the trashcans?  Sometimes thoughts take hold and take over.  Have you ever experienced yourself thinking at lightning speed?  The thoughts are flying so fast through your brain that even if you tried you couldn’t say them aloud as they were forming?  After I noticed the three R’s on loop in my head, I started thinking about how appreciative I was knowing other people recycle in this world.  Likely not as many as there should be, but having to open and close five of the eight trashcans to finally find an empty one made me smile.  Memories racing now.  I’m in the kitchen of my childhood home and my mom is rinsing out a plastic bag.  She grabs a clothes pin and attaches it to our hanging fruit basket.  She is cleaning this sandwich bag to be used for tomorrow’s packed lunch.  A smile breaks across my face again as this memory takes over.

This year's Earth Day was the 46th anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement.  I hope you did Mother Earth a solid and found a recycling bin for that piece of junk mail or soda can instead of tossing it into the trash.  Small changes really do make a large difference in the scheme of things.

“The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.” -Lady Bird Johnson