Out With the Old

I don't know about all teachers, but Mackinac Island teachers tend to be hoarders. You never know when you might need something, and it's not like you can just make a quick stop at Meijer on your way to work...

As a result of years of that behavior, yesterday was Clean Out the Storage Room Day. Haven't used that in five years? Let it go! The text books and teacher's guides from two math series ago? Let it go! Broken furniture that was going be be repaired but wasn't? Let it go! Gallons of expired spring water? Let it go!

Let me tell you, we let a lot go.

As we were bringing boxes outside, I found this note in one of them. It made me giggle because it essentially referred to 90% of the items in that room. That box had been there a while because I can't remember whose handwriting that is.

By the end of the day the entire pile had been skillfully  Tetrised into a "two-footer." A two-footer is a trash dray with sides that are two feet tall. People usually use items, as we did, to extend its' capacity, though there is a weight limit. It can't be too heavy for a team of horses to haul it, up hill, out to the Solid Waste Handling Facility - which everyone just calls the Dump. Once there the items are sorted for disposal: wood, metals, general trash, etc. All the non-recyclable and non-compostable trash is sent to the mainland since our landfill was capped in the early 1990s. Compostable items are shredded, mixed with horse manure and restaurant food waste and then turned into to soil. 

A second two-footer is coming next week to get rid of the rest. Yeah, there's more. I told you we were hoarders.