Twice a year, my town has a Big Garbage Day. I’m sure there’s a more official name than that—Repurpose Large Items Day, It Won’t Fit In the Bin Stop Trying To Cram It In There, Greg Day—but I’ve always called it Big Garbage Day, and it is secretly my favorite time of the year.
Most small towns I’ve lived in have some version of this. It’s a chance to get rid of yellowing couches, half-broken bureaus, oversized children’s toys. Things you no longer want that just don’t fit in an average garbage can. For those unfamiliar, you set out your items up to a week before the agreed upon pickup day, just right out on the street or at the end of your driveway. There’s an unspoken rule that the minute the item leaves your hands it’s fair game for passersby until the sanitation department picks it up. A lesser version of this strange economy happens all year—just throw your stuff outside with the added crucial step of scrawling out a “FREE” sign to put next to it. Sometimes it works; most of the time it’s a placeholder, and I see neighbors dragging rain-sodden mattresses to the dump weeks later after they find someone with a pickup truck that can take them.
As a younger woman, Big Garbage day was a chance for me to furnish my apartment. As a relatively handy, creative, and poor person, I would set to work sanding, staining, painting, and re-covering chairs, desks, and couches. I didn’t purchase my first piece of brand new, never-been-farted-on-by-another-human-butt furniture until I was almost 30 years old. You have to maintain a healthy ignorance during Big Garbage Day hunting, ignoring the factual reality of bedbugs and steering clear of anything that looks like it could be blood, but with enough patience and dollar fabric rolls from Joanns, you can find some good shit.
I appreciate Big Garbage Day for a different reason now: I’m unbelievably nosy.
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