A date at the dump

Do The Hustle

Back in my twenties, weekends were all about hanging out and letting the day unfold.

Chris and I lived in New York City and floated through the decade trying new restaurants, closing down bars or queuing up to hear bands. Our relationship was one continuous date night - we didn’t have to be home at a certain time, pay a babysitter more than the cost of dinner and a movie, balance a checkbook together or squabble over whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher.

Even getting groceries was fun, as we walked around our East Village neighborhood, perusing specialty markets, while discussing all our creative aspirations and plans.

We imagined our future would be one upward climb, not the circuitous route, with twists and turns, and ups and downs, that life really is.

Now, twenty plus years later, our weekends are defined and consumed by the never-ending hustle and tasks required to keep our household of two teenagers, a dog and a parakeet afloat.

Our chore list is so long that we divide and conquer, self-selecting the tasks we each take based on proclivity and aptitude. Chris loves to cook so usually does all the grocery shopping and I like to go to the dump.

In our small Maine town, taking the trash and recyclables to the dump is a weekly social event, where you run into at least five people you know as you move through a winding que to separate your newspapers, plastics and bottles. When you haven’t dumped regularly, or during the pandemic when everyone was drinking heavily to survive, it can be a little embarrassing to unpack all your empties and excess in front of the entire community.

Like last weekend when our shed was piled with so many bags of ripe and sagging garbage that Chris and I agreed it was no longer a one-person job.  As we loaded the swollen bags into our car, the sky opened up and started to rain down on us.

It was the perfect time to have a fight, but somehow, we started laughing.

Instead of fixating on the sour stench enveloping our vehicle, we started finding ways to crack each other up, acting like we were on our way to our favorite bar, not a municipal transfer station with empty beer cans and wine bottles.

The pouring rain kept other couples away, but made us laugh harder as we separated our #1 and #5 plastics side-by-side and then high-fived by a tower of used tires.

“When we were dating in New York, did you ever imagine we would one day be living it up at the town dump?” Chris asked. 

Not wanting the fun to end, we went onto the grocery store together, sharing one cart and some hand sanitizer. With no soccer games or playdates competing for our attention, we continued onto the hardware store and dry cleaners like newlyweds, checking off all the chores on our shared list and even catching the post office, for last call.

New York City always smells a little from all the garbage bags lining the sidewalks, so maybe it was the cloying scent that took me back to my twenties, or maybe it was the just spontaneity of the day, as Chris and I continued to hang out, making our normally mundane tasks fun, because we were doing them together.

Just before we got home, The Hustle, came onto Chris’s playlist, and we instinctively started doing the seventies dance moves, driving past our turn and on around the block, so we could sing the song loudly to its end.

When you are 25, you don’t think the key to a good relationship is being able to laugh when you are hauling garbage, but in your fifties, you know if you can laugh at the dump, you can laugh anywhere.