A Box of Paper

I am not shy about taking useful objects out of other people’s trash. I am most likely to rescue such unfortunates if I can use them myself, but I have also been known to snatch items from the trash and take them to local charities. 

Once, when our communal trash spot was an alley, we saved an end table, which we painted bright blue and put in the corner of our living room. Other times we have taken lumber or other raw materials to be used in household projects. 

I lamented an inability to save a large dog house that was being pitched. I don’t have a dog or need a dog house, but it seemed a shame for such a large thing with so much more good use in it to end up in a landfill. Too late it occurred to me that I could have called one of the many charities with trucks to come haul it away.

Trash-rescue is a family trait. One relative saved a lovely sheet set and comforter from a dumpster near her house, laundering the soft jersey back into life. She gave us the mismatched comforter that was in the bag. We dyed the comforter purple and still use it in the summertime, some ten years after the fact. 

About five years ago, a neighbor put out a box with her trash bags. 

I must have walked by it twice before I realized that it was a box of paper. Thankfully there had been no rain that day. I didn’t have the sort of printer that accepted continuous-feed paper (you know, the kind with the strips of holes down both sides?), but I did have three scribbly Sonars. The first time I went to salvage the box, I had the smallest Sonar on my hip, but couldn’t manage him and the box at the same time. I returned a little bit later, surprised to find that the box was more than three-fourths full of crisp, white, unblemished paper. 

In the past five years that paper has been torn off in single sheets, or long strips. It has been folded into countless airplanes, cranes, frogs, boxes, and other origami-joy, as well as wadded into balls of frustration. It has been colored on, penciled on, painted on, cut out, torn up, and traced into dabbles of Sonar imagination. I have written lists, planned stories, and folded envelopes for bits of mail that didn’t seem to fit into anything else suitable for the U.S. Postal Service. The thin, hole-y edge strips have been rolled and twisted into whimsical scrolls, and taped together into tails and ribbons. I frequently find them, forgotten after some frenzy of creation, under the couch. 

I went to get a few sheets of paper the other day, surprised to find that after five years of weekly, if not daily use, the box is still more than one-fourth full. What dreams will yet unfold from those leaves?