10 THINGS: LITTER by Susan Messer

litter 001/susan messer, originally uploaded by patryfrancis.

I'll be away for a couple of days to celebrate a particular anniversary. (More on that when I return.) While I'm gone, I leave you with my guest blogger and co-creator of the Literary Blues Pie, Susan Messer, who takes on the assignment of collecting ten things that are alike, but different. In an interesting and illuminating choice, Susan chose litter.

"It is estimated that 40% of the litter in the Borough is smoking related, be it wrappers, cartons or cigarette ends."
-- Gedling Borough Council, England



“Studies show that areas which are allowed to remain dirty are prone to becoming more dirty, i.e., litter gives ‘permission’ to litter.”

--Wikipedia

Well, I can’t confirm the 40% (I wasn’t that scientific), but I can confirm that once you start paying attention, a lot of the litter you’ll see as you go about your business has something to do with cigarettes, and an awful lot has to do with eating and drinking. I can also confirm that litter gives permission to litter, because I’ve now started to notice that these pesky discards tend to occur in clusters, sometimes in extremely heavy clusters.



I can confirm, too, that as soon as I got the idea from Patry’s blog to collect litter while strolling, I started to see litter everywhere: Right on my front lawn, a Hostess snack cake wrapper. At the corner, a Kool cigarette butt.. Across the street, a cluster—a turquoise plastic cup, a Red Bull can, and a Nestle’s Crunch wrapper. All along my way, tucked into bushes, lying in parkway grass, bunched up in gutters, I saw litter: water bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, potato chip bags, Styrofoam cups. Cigarette packs, more cigarette butts. Scrunched-up newspaper pages. Pens and pencils. Coffee cup tops. A high-heeled boot.



It didn’t take long to see that I couldn’t pick up everything I saw, so I set limits, established guidelines: (1) nothing too gross, (2) nothing too big or heavy to fit in my bag (no car parts, for example; no rain-soaked shirts or jackets), (3) nothing that would require me to step into mud puddles or walk across a stranger’s lawn, and (4) no duplicates (e.g., one Aquafina was enough).



At home, I took my collection down the basement, divided it into two arrangements, and went back to work, slightly forgetting that I’d left it all there, and not bothering to check whether the photos were any good. A few days later, my husband asked me how long I was going to leave those things lying around in the basement, so I said "I'm throwing them out right now," and I did—sorting the garbage from the recycling and disposing of them properly.

Another thing I can confirm: Once you start noticing, it’s hard to turn the noticing off, which can be kind of sad when the thing you’re noticing is litter.