Of Flea Markets and Landfills

Today is Tuesday, trash day. Of all the events that have importance on the weekly calendar, Tuesday cannot be missed. The big truck comes by around 8:30 or 9am, stops for maybe a minute and carries off what has taken a week to collect. In the last year or so we have become more intentional in recycling and so if we miss a week of feeding the trash truck, our trash can will have room for another week of collecting. Collecting, that is what we do as Americans, we collect. Each week I save up all the unwanted stuff and send it to the big collection place in the city where it is transferred to bigger trucks that take it to the bigger collection place, the landfill. Landfill is itself an interesting word, seeing as how most of the time, the trash I send is not filling up the land, the land is already full. The landfill people, just scrape off some of the land and pile the trash high and then cover it with what they scrapped off. Now the collection is covered.
This past weekend my wife and I partook in one of our fun activities, we went flea-marketing. Almost always we have some goal or item or "collectible" which we are looking for, this time we did not. And so we spent more time just looking, it gives us time together that doesn't require reservations or much planning at all. As we were going through these monuments to the American way of life and desire, it occurred to me that the line between flea markets and landfills is very thin.
Nearly every flea market you shop in has some really good stuff, stuff that is new or looks like new. There are booths that are decorated with the stuff of the past and are much fancier than any room in our home. But in almost everyone of these markets you will find an area or a couple of booths that are filled with stuff that looks just like what the trash man picked up at your house last week. So in all this shopping around on Sunday, it suddenly dawned on me that each and every person really should have a flea market booth. It makes so much more sense than paying someone to take your trash and bury it. It really is the ultimate recycle center.
I thought of all the flea markets just in our area and was grateful to the people who had opted not to make more trash heaps, but to display there cast offs, and occasionally make a dollar off someone like me. I tried to imagine how many cubic yards of dirt it would take to cover all the iron, aluminum, tin and plastic in the flea markets in southwest Missouri, or how much pollution would be pumped into the air from burning all that furniture, paper and wood. This thought process made me look at the whole world of flea markets and antique stores in a new light. Now each time I pass those rundown building with a poorly lettered "Antiques" sign, I will be thankful that someone will take the time to sort their castoffs, display them and live in hope for a dollar here or there . I'm thankful for flea markets, they are helping save the Earth. I'm also thankful for those green bottles I needed for a garden project and that John Denver and the Muppet's VHS I got for a dollar. See you at the landfill, er, flea market! Peace.