The first of my good deeds, today I picked up garbage along my road.

I live on a rural road. When I go out for a walk, I’ve always noticed the garbage that accumulates along the route and I’ve always considered walking with a garbage bag to pick it up. That’s how it ended up on the 40 list.

I headed out with a Loblaws bag in my left hand and a latex glove on my right. I wondered if I would find anything since the grass was long, but I need not have worried.

Here’s some of what I picked up:

• 2 cigarette packs (less than I thought)
• 2 coffee cups (Tim Horton’s and generic)
• Tim Horton’s, Burger King and
• Heavy nut and bolt (made me worry for the underside of someone’s car)
• Several straw wrappers
• 1 straw, still wrapped
• Plastic Coke bottle
• Coke cup
• 2 gum packages
• Lots of paper in various stages of decay
• 1 Dairy Queen cup
• 1 plastic spoon (which I like to think belongs to the ice cream cup)
• 4 water bottles

Here’s what I learned:

• Food packaging is ruining the planet. About 90% of what I picked up was food packaging.
• I must stop worrying what other people think. Each time a car (or truck!) drove by, I wondered if they would notice what I was doing. And if they did, would they think it was a good idea or that I was a nut?  Maybe when I reach the wisdom of 40, I’ll realize that nobody is thinking about me anyway.
• When you’ve got a bag of garbage in one hand, and a dirty latex glove on the other… there’s no way to push the hair off your face.

As I reached the home stretch, I found a water bottle filled with brownish-yellow liquid with the lid on it. Naturally I suspected it was pee and I considered leaving it as “too gross” to pick. But I was wearing a glove so I considered it a test of my commitment and I picked it up. Whatever it was, it smelled like peach drink when I poured it out. Luckily, I think it smelled like peach drink.

I noticed when I got back that I had lost my sunglasses. They’d been hanging off my shirt, since they were too loose to stay on my head and wearing them made it difficult to spot the trash. I took the car out to look for them, but with no success.

Unless I find them next time I walk down the road, I actually CONTRIBUTED to the garbage problem on the evening I was trying to remove it. Whoops.