Recycling the Neighborly Way.

Ever have something you needed to get rid of, but hated to part with? My mother's Danish Modern dining room set was pushing sixty years old. The table is fine and I use it every day. But the chairs, sigh, the chairs. They never were the sturdiest. Over the decades they've gone from graceful to rickety to suspect. But I remember how excited my mother was setting out, with just my father, to the furniture store to pick the set out. I remember the dangerous old folding dining room table we had before. I remember the big truck coming to deliver it all; table and chairs, china cabinet, side board and a small table with drawers. I remember how proud my mother was of the set... The chairs were passable when I moved to Phoenix, but a decade in the desert has turned the old foam cushions to a brittle powder. I moved on to other chairs. In fact, as I type, I'm sitting on one of my sisters 40+ year old dining room chairs (her old dinning room table sits in my library). My sister's chairs are sturdy and have no seat cushions part of the structure to go bad. They'll easily last a 100 years or more... So my mother's chairs were just painfully in the way. Banishing them to the garage would hardly be a solution.

This week the city picks up loose trash from my neighborhood for free. Tree limbs, dead washing machines, anything bulky that isn't hazardous including furniture. I suppose the Salvation Army might have taken them. But it would take a heck of a lot of work to make them salable. I doubt they'd ever be worth what it would cost to fix them. But we have plenty of people in the neighborhood who think differently... It is a standing tradition that anything set out for the loose trash pickup is fair game for anyone who wants it. A few Hispanic families nearby, come by and look at *everything* and frequently they will take anything fixable. I set the chairs out yesterday morning. By nightfall, though I heard nothing, I could tell that at least two different groups had examined the chairs. This morning they were all gone save a broken one including the broken one's cushion. It makes me feel better about throwing out my mother's old chairs knowing someone who knows what they are doing will try to get some more life out of them.