Today's off to a good start. I managed to drag the rubbish to the road for pickup. Luckily it was only one 30 gallon, plastic bag. Two weeks worth.

Since the car's snowed in at the bottom of its grassy knoll, I had to haul the bag down the hill by hand. I managed to avoid throwing my back out, or breaking a leg by slipping on ice, or ripping the bag open on an errant branch.

The descent reminded me of trash day when I lived in a fifth floor walk-up in a Brooklyn brownstone, only the stairs weren't icy or nearly as steep. And I was younger.

Back then I was going to school, even more impecunious than I am today, so sometimes trash went up the stairs too. Other people's trash, that is. A cunning little bookcase someone had mistaken for a lopsided box, and a chair that stayed upright quite comfortably if you shifted most of your weight to one side.

Then there was the severed head I found propped up by the curb. Not just any severed head either. The head of none other than John the Baptist, served up by Salome. Why anyone would throw away a three-foot tall reproduction of a Gustav Klimt painting I'll never know.

Anyway, today's bag is at the roadside, waiting for the waste disposal truck, or a feral cat, a dog that's slipped its chain, or a couple crows. Whoever gets there first.