Going home for break is never complete without being put to work by my ex-carpenter father. Every time I walk through the door, the smell of sheetrock, metal, or wood shavings smacks me in the face. As much as I'd like to turn around and spend the weekend at a friends, I know for a fact that my dad has been holding off on heavy lifting until I get home.
So, I offer to help my dad like the good son that I am. Over Thanksgiving, my dad took the privilege of filling the bed of my Dodge Ram with half a ton of tile and broken cement. He was redoing the mudroom floor, and it turned out to be a harder job than he expected. (What else is new?)
I drove the truck to a friend's house, who just so happened to be a contractor with a large dumpster sitting in his backyard. I rolled up my sleeves, put on a pair of work gloves, and my dad did the same. We began throwing handfuls of debris into the metal bowl, dropping sediment onto the lawn after every motion. As I continued the labor, I began to wonder just how polluted this man's backyard was.
This man was a contractor. On a daily basis, he dumps truckloads of powdery garbage into this same dumpster, as do thousands of other contractors all over the world. The amount that my dad and I were dumping was enough to disturb me, but the thought of reality was shocking. In fact, I find the amount of pollution that enters "healthy soil" on a daily basis incomprehensible, and downright scary.
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