At least that's what I was thinking a few days back. Not because of my immediate neighbors, the Hellbound Cable Thief on one side, the Dysfunctionals on the other. Nor was it the fact that every single one of us is constitutionally incapable of following simple rules for recycling. (Whether you believe it's legit or not, if you're gonna bother to do it, at least try to do it right.)
No, I was thinking this because someone seemed to think this was just fine to leave out for our garbage men.
This photo of the mountain of home furnishings does not begin to do it justice. There was a second, bigger TV and a huge iron frame and an entire sofa, for example. TV sets are not considered appropriate for trash pickup; grills, sofas, and bureaus probably cause consternation as well. I couldn't believe someone would just put this enormous pile out as is.
I should have known there was more to the story.
A few weeks after the stuff was carted off -- and it was, although it took the trash men a couple of different collections -- the people in the house disappeared. The driveway, which had had a boat and a plateless car rusting away for years, was suddenly empty. Closer examination a couple of days later showed a notice on the front door that appeared to indicate the property had been secured for nonpayment of debt (or possibly taxes). In which case the town may have arranged to have the stuff hauled away by the company that does our garbage collection.
None of this should have come as a surprise to me. I'm sure it didn't to people who live closer and are even nosier and more likely to notice than no one in the place ever seemed to go to work.
The house is in very sad shape. It needs paint, but that's like saying the Titanic needed to be patched up a little. God knows what the inside looks like. Whoever takes the property over may just flatten it and build anew. Although they ought to know that it may be haunted.
Yep -- no lie; a man was murdered in that house. That's 100% true. One night when we'd been here a couple of years, the police came stopped by to ask if we'd seen anything. We hadn't, but the killer was caught, so rest easy, citizens.
It's a sordid tale for another time.
I suspect most or maybe all of the stuff that was dumped had belonged to the dead man. It looked old enough.
As for the person who moved in, a distant heir of the victim, I guess he never had the dough to do upkeep, let alone pay his taxes. Or perhaps the ability. One of the things left behind when the rest of the trash was hauled away, along with some broken glass and bits of cardboard, were a couple of Tramadol in the blister packs that expired in 2013. Probably got lost in the sofa. I found them while walking one of the dogs and flushed them down to Davy Jones's locker. Glad I got them and not one of the local kids.
What does this have to do with me, aside from providing me with the plot for my next book (The Haunted Garbage Pile)? Nothing, except I have a mattress to dispose of, and if the garbage truck will take that giant pile, I guess I can leave my mattress out. Nothing in the town's notice on trash collection that prohibits mattresses, just the usual dangerous stuff like refrigerators. And TV sets.
I got a new mattress to replace the old one in the guest room, where I love to take naps because the dogs can't find me. Following the advice of Lewes and others from the comments section of the site of the Great Lileks, I got a bed-in-a-box type mattress from Amazon (I was at the tail end of a free Amazon Prime trial, so what the hell). If you've never gotten a mattress this way, I recommend it. It's amazing. The mattress comes in a box that's way too small for a queen-size mattress, rolled up and pressed as flat as a respectable potholder. As soon as it is unrolled and unfolded and the plastic cover is cut, it begins to inflate. It's like a slow-motion version of an emergency inflatable raft going off. Laura Petrie would be fascinated.
I haven't tried out the mattress yet, as you have to let it sit in place for 48 hours to recover from the smush-down it got in the factory. But it looks pretty good.
Trash day is tomorrow, so the old mattress leaves (I hope) in the morning. Do not worry, trash collectors: my garbage is free of all tormented spirits. I'm the only tormented spirit that ever laid on that mattress.
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