A Road Less Travelled

A beautiful new thing has recently entered our household. Um, besides Hope, I mean. I know she’s new and beautiful, but I meant something different. So a new and beautiful thing that is not and has nothing to do with Hope has entered our household recently. The chore of taking out the garbage has been assigned to Isaac.

When I first heard about this plan I was a bit skeptical. I was expecting to be called upon frequently by a desperate child needing garbage help. I thought it was a nice idea, but was sure it would never work. I have rarely been so happy to have been proved wrong. Well, there was that one time. And, let’s be honest, that other time, but other than those times rarely been so happy.

It’s awesome. I will wave my hands at the overflowing garbage can and say “Hey, Isaac, could you take care of that?” And then, with some grunting and heaving done entirely by someone else, the garbage vanishes and is replaced by a brand new, clean, empty trash bag ready to be filled. And then, here’s my favorite part, he hauls it out back to the garbage cans.

Really, this is where I was expecting the process to break down. Especially when the garbage cans haven’t been brought back in from the alley. Issac can’t reach the latch on the gate yet and so I was expecting to be fetched by a frustrated young lad who needed help with the gate and permission to venture out into the alley. Not so. He hasn’t asked for my help once. And yet the garbage still makes it into the can.

See, Isaac is very creative. He doesn’t know he’s creative and much of his creativity is used on things he wants to care about and not on what other are wanting him to care about, but in this instance he rose to the challenge. I looked outside one time when he was taking the trash out and saw him standing on the compost bin heaving the garbage bag over the fence. Yes, my smaller-than-average, nine-year-old nephew managed to haul a very full garbage bag up onto a compost bin with him and lift it over the fence and into a garbage can. But that’s not all. See, the can in the alley had been closed. So Isaac found a long pole in the yard leftover from some project or other and used it to flip the can open. And all I had to do was wave my hands at the garbage in the kitchen. Seriously, it’s a beautiful thing.