Reduce, Reuse, Bury in a Tree Well - Shannon
A few weeks ago I took our dog to the courtyard on our street to sit in the sun. As I sat on the stone wall and looked around I saw a very stiff, very dead, animal leg – sticking up out of the dirt. There was a time (I call it “before Spain”) when such a site would have made me bolt out of my skin, but after 2 years here I have admittedly been desensitized to seeing dead animals, in various forms, especially, as this turned out to be, ham legs.
In our neighborhood there are basically 3 ways we deal with trash, recyclables and things we just don’t want anymore. For absolutely irredeemable garbage there are bins about half a block down. For all recyclables (glass, aluminum, paper and plastic) we hand carry everything to bins with underground receptacles about 6 blocks away in the city center. For anything else that might be reused, from dishes to clothing to furniture, there is an active (albeit unofficial) donation/reclamation spot in our neighborhood courtyard. In most instances it takes only a short while for goods placed in the courtyard to be taken away. We once saw a couch stripped entirely of its fabric within 20 minutes after being left there. When we cleaned many of the 50+ abandoned terracotta pots from our terraza, we couldn’t put them outside fast enough.
This is how there came to be a long and spindly animal leg sticking out of the dirt just feet from our front door. Because, as I realized on closer inspection, it was one of our very own ham legs. One we had finished with and discarded in the bins a few months ago. I’m assuming that some creature retrieved the leg from the trash and buried it in the tree well, but I honestly can’t imagine how. The doors to the garbage bins are about 1 x 2 feet in size and fairly high off the ground – I have seen the nuns on our street basically reach *up* to put their trash inside… Also, there are iron doors that are bolted shut on the front of the three cement walls encasing the bins….
Whatever super-able creature retrieved the ham leg seems to have a bit of a thing for Brian too because just today I found one of Brian’s shoes, unearthed, in that tree well – it had obviously been buried long ago.