We get a lot of trash on our street. I think our block is maybe at some sort of critical distance from the local high school where the kids get out for the day, hit the convenience store for junk food, and then finish their snacks on our block on the walk home. There are no municipal trash receptacles on our block, so the kids just discard the wrappers and packaging wherever they are on the block.

It may also be the drug dealers. I think since they’re working a certain section of the neighborhood, they don’t have lot of time to go from one trash can to the next to discard whatever packaging they’ve got. Sometimes it’s like a styrofoam container of a whole meal, maybe. It gets dumped on the curb or in the storm drain across the street.

We’re also on a modest-sized thoroughfare for traffic heading out of city, both morning and afternoon drive times. But it’s probably not that so much, although I’m sure stuff gets thrown out of cars then too. Mostly the stuff tossed from cars seems like beer or wine bottles, probably not rush hour trash.

Dawn and I sometimes do a trash run, picking up the block, on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. We don gloves and drag a trash bag up and down the street, picking up all the trash. Some days we fill up the trash bag pretty full. Mostly the trash doesn’t bother me, except for broken bottles. That really annoys me. Like, it’s almost okay to discard something on my street, but why do you have to break the bottle when you do it?

And then there’s this one type of candy wrapper that we see all the time. It’s some sort of Tootsie Roll product, but not like the fake chocolate of a Tootsie Roll proper. Rather it’s a related or spin-off product called Frooties. Somebody on the block or somebody who goes through a lot sure does love those, since I’m almost guaranteed to find at least one discarded wrapper every time we pick up the trash.

I think this bothers me more than the broken glass, even, as if everything else is just a one-time thing that someone has dropped, someone who never has littered before and may never litter again, like they’ve just dropped this one thing just this one time. But the Frooties wrappers I always think it’s the same person. I want to stay home every day and guard vigilantly and set up video surveillance and helicopters and whatever, and find the person who’s dropping the Frooties wrappers and just say, hey, cut it out, willya.