dumpsters

[P5se Camelback]

You are totally right, Ralph! We were very lucky kids to have a place to go to to get away from the heat of blacktop and concrete in the city of Philadelphia! But it wasn't because we were rich or anything. It was about priorities! My Dad could not take a vacation and stay at home ... we lived next door to the Church and never ever had a dinner without an interruption, either by the phone or the doorbell ... they knew where he was at 5:30 PM. So he borrowed against life insurance and rented the cottage out for all of the late spring and early summer months and in the early fall in order to pay the mortgage on it. And despite not having a phone (no one back in there in the woods did,) the year 'round people out by the highway did, and almost every year, they'd come back to get him (at dinner time, of course!) and take him to their phone ... and he'd then have to head home the next morning to do a funeral or something ... poor guy! Some vacation!

Now ... not to ...

But back in the late forties and into the fifties (possibly the sixties even) I don't think that super-rural upstate Pennsylvania had any kind of "approved sites" of any kind. All the small garbage collection guys dumped at the same spot back in those same woods that they'd been dumpng the garbage since the late '30's or early 1940's. I mean, we're talking "upstate rural" here. There were still locals who had and used "out houses" in the area ... our place was one o' them new fangled jobbers with a sess pool dug under ground with a french drain to a leach field down the hill! It wasn't until the early sixties that in the fall one year, Dad had a septic tank put in!

I mean, people didn't think anything of that stuff back then. We used to spread old used oil on the crushed red shale road to keep the dust down when a car went by too fast! otherwise all the clothes that my mother had just washed by hand that were drying on the line stretched between two pine trees got covered in red shale dust, including Dad's "Gotta Be White Pulpit shirts!" ... yuck!

I don't really intend to interject any "sub-title" editorial remarks ... they just kinda happen on their own. I'll try to be more aware of that kind of thing ... but it's tough to teach an old dog new tricks ... and this dog ain't no puppy!

Edit: Corrected the spelling of the city in which I grew up ... how could I misspell that?