Ann Ferro: Windy days and gift wrapping

It’s windy today. The windows in my “office” are rattling a message that explains why our street is littered with debris. It’s also garbage pickup day and no matter how secure your container, this wind has its way with each lid. As we wended our way to Animal Wellness to bring another feral cat in for aleterations, we saw, in addition to a variety of discarded objects, three empty plastic gallon jugs doing the throw-away almost samba like dance back and forth across the street.
And it got me thinking about garbage, detritus, etc. As an anthropology major who has spent time on archaeology digs, garbage is important. Garbage can tell you a lot about how a group of people lived. For instance, at one dig I was allowed to take a few pieces of found garbage back to use in my classroom. The pieces were simple, a few rabbit bones and several pieces of broken pottery including a piece of a pottery pipe complete with designs etched around the rim. There was much more than this at this dump, in archaeological terminology, a midden. It produced including a Herkimer diamond, most probably from a shaman’s pouch. Since there are no Herkimer diamonds locally, it meant that trade existed between this group and groups to the east.
When I lived in Brooklyn, we put our garbage for 6 people in an old burlap bag. It was never full except on the day after Christmas. There were more ashes in the ash can than discarded stuff from the Smwithwick household. Thinking about it, and comparing it with the two garbage cans that we roll out to the curb once a week for two people, it is pretty obvious that we have more stuff and a lot of that stuff is disposable by plan.
A lot of this stuff is packaging. Why do you need a box to hold some potion for your after- shower fix? Beats me. Why does a potato peeler have to be attached to a piece of cardboard? It doesn’t, but it is. Why did six pork chops need to be housed in a plastic bubble? A rotisserie chicken in a similar housing?
If I were to dig down into the garbage from the time when I was young ( yes, the dinosaurs had vandished by then) one thing I wouldn’t find would be plastic and paper diapers. They didn’t exist. It was cloth “nappies” all the way. Today, there would be layers of Pampers and their ilk not decomposing in the modern-day middens. The disposed of electronics of our eras would be other layers that are unique to our times as are thrown away clothing, furniture and food waste, etc. in far greater amounts than in the past. Think of how hard it is to find a resting place for pillows, shoes, tires, etc. We are the “materialist” and material generations.
The materials of our lives are closely interwoven with the economy. The economics of packaging, of producing the products on which we have come to depend … and I do depend on modern technology … produce jobs and incomes.
While I believe completely that I had a wonderful and full childhood, and yes, without some things I desperately wanted, like paper dolls and skate keys, it caused me to be more creative ( I made my own paper dolls and tied my skates on … the latter didn’t work and I had the skinned knees and hands to prove it). We had little stuff, few clothes, a very modest number of toys and a rich life. We were not special, but rather like most families of that era.
Today we are wrapped up in lives designed by aspirational economics that dictate that we have stuff. It is the stuff of success, of needing storage facilities and big problems of what to do with that stuff when we no longer want it.
I don’t mean to wax philosophical on this windy day, but maybe the wind is telling us something about who we are, the essence of what we now hold as important as it distributes garbage through the village..
Or maybe its just a windy day and I am sitting in my “office” which is full of wrapping paper shards and that aching back that comes from folding and taping boxes of presents. And I’m not half done. A lot of stuff to wrap.