Trashing the Neighborhood

My neighbors are pigs. Not literally. As I understand it, pigs are quite intelligent, so perhaps it's not a good analogy.

I live in a decent suburban neighborhood and walk my dogs every morning. The one thing about walking anywhere is you really get a good perspective. It's a great way to get to know a new place, or experience a vacation. You see things you might not normally see if driving. Which is why I'm so disgusted by my neighbors.

For the last week...literally 7-days...I have had to steer the dogs away from what I think is an old bath mat or towel which is laying in one neighbors' front yard. Just a few feet away in the grass near their mailbox, presumably where they place their trash can, is a (gulp) used mini-pad. This particular neighbor has 3 or 4 little girls, and the wife runs an at-home daycare. If we had been experiencing sub-zero weather, or some other form of nasty weather, I'd understand why these things were still there. But it's been unseasonable warm, and the kids are playing outside every afternoon.

Because my dogs are big: the younger one, Buster weighs in at 90 lbs and my sweet Honey-Bear is 70 lbs, I cannot simply go up to the door and request they clean up this stuff. Plus Honey and Buster happen to hate this neighbor's little demon dog. "Fluffy" is allowed to run free throughout the neighborhood, frequently taunting both dogs and dog-walkers, as well as leaving his personal calling card in everyone's yard.

Another pet peeve. How hard is it to scoop your poop, people? On our 20-minute walks, I see no less than 20 poop piles along the way. Not only is it disgusting, and dangerous (you know what I mean if you've ever stepped in it), it demonstrates how little my neighbors respect our neighborhood.

Buster has been known to drop a load as large as Paris Hilton's little chihuahua (not the Chihuahua's poop...the actual dog). It's no laughing matter, and believe me, I'd rather let it be, but that would be irresponsible of me as a dog owner and as a neighbor. So I collect it with plastic grocery bags...sometimes two plastic grocery bags. We keep a small receptacle at the far corner of our garage (I've thought of keeping one of those Diaper Genie's out there) so as keep the odors away from the house. We empty it every trash day.

I'm not saying we're the best at keeping our yard beautiful. Our neighbor, the fireman, keeps his yard (and his home) spotless. It baffles me how someone can work a million hours a week and still keep everything so neat. I work about 20-hours and still have dog-fur-tumbleweeds rolling down the front hall. I just don't understand leaving something like sanitary napkins or a pile of orange peels (another house just up the street) just laying there.

Today as I walked by the townhouses whose backyards face the main street, I saw empty bottles and cereal boxes and a wealth of other trash in the yards, not on the street. When I walk around the semi-track up the street, there is an old trashcan with the bottom broken out, piles of cigarette butts near the park bench, empty beer bottles, and parked near the bushes as though trying to hide, a broken big wheel.

It breaks my heart.

I believe every challenge has a solution. So instead of just bitching, I guess I'll grab my trash bags and begin cleaning up. I used to see this older couple every morning walking and gathering trash in bags. I used to think how nice it was of them to do that. I don't see them anymore. Either they moved, or gave up.