Country: The Burn Pile

I never before realized a unique privilege of country life: burn piles.

In the country, if you have an old sofa, pet bed, or pool solar cover that needs trashed, you simply lug it out to the burn pile and light a match. Sure, you probably shouldn’t be burning plastic, but it sure is fun to watch a plastic cover that once heated the pool shrivel up into a tiny ball of nothing, crackling and popping all along the way.

Got a new refrigerator and think it sucks that you have to wait a week to pitch the box? Burn it.

I think my family became addicted to this feeling, this urge, simply knowing that we didn’t need to keep garbage. In fact, the garbage collectors encourage burning. If you have more than a couple of bags by the curb/mailbox (I think I should put quotations around both of those words), they charge you more. In addition to that, you must plan ahead. So if your dishwasher stopped working on Tuesday, forcing you to purchase a new one Wednesday, the same day of garbage collection, you are totally screwed. Those collectors won’t even touch the box that your dishwasher came in. In fact, they might get so pissed at the sight of extra-unexpected garbage, they throw it in the middle of the road. Now your neighbors are pissed at you too.

We burned everything. Once, while opening the pool years and years ago in May, my Mom watched with utter confusion as my Dad threw the pool pump into the burning burn pile. They later realized he had torched the new pool pump, not the old one. Really, shame on the pool pump manufacturers for making the pumps identical. And shame on the county, because we never burned a thing before we moved here.

Burning whatever you want in the country is completely acceptable. It’s your property, so spark it up and say a prayer, those flames will die down soon, or at the very latest tomorrow morning.