Trash Day

One day, I found a new passion - I decided to help my brother-in-law and my sister to clean their house from old stuff. John’s house was enormous, but he had no closet space left, collecting different things since his bachelor years.

As soon as John left for work, I opened all closets. The job was not hard; I put a black trash bag next to the closet and started throwing out old plastic boxes, lids, old flower vases, and old shoes. I could hardly wait for John to come home.

Normally, he enters the house whistling; this time, the kitchen door opened without the whistling signal; John stood at the entrance with the trash bag in his hand, “What is this?” 

I happily smiled, “Oh, John, I cleaned the first closet in the hall. It is empty now! Tomorrow, I will do another one!”

John silently proceeded into the hall and placed everything back on the shelves, “Lydia, from now on, you throw out nothing without asking me first. Understood?”

Of course, I understood! I need to clean the closets on trash day! How wonderful life was in Russia – we didn’t have to wait for the truck to come by or chase it through the neighborhood with a twenty-pound plastic bag if we missed trash day.

“You have to understand Lidooshka – she is stubborn. If she nods her head in agreement, it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘yes’ – it means the opposite.” John, with his Harvard degree, was too intuitive to outsmart. I continued secretly cleaning John’s closets until, one day, he called me, “Lydia, where is my little green vase? It was here on this shelf.” I watched that vase for weeks, planning carefully its disappearance – it can’t be possible that John remembered! Well, he did, but it was too late – the garbage truck was gone, with that little green vase in its greedy maw. From now on, if anything disappeared in his house, John commented, “It might be Lidooshka!” It sounds especially amusing when I am in Kansas and things disappear in Shreveport or get broken in Louisiana – “It might be Lidooshka!”