Recycling center/scrap yard

Working in a recycling center/scrap yard, has allowed me a rare view into the lives of our discarded house hold items.  Each day people drive in across the scales, with hidden treasures.  It is not odd to pull a perfectly fine cast iron skillet, or pot out of pile.  Not uncommon to see hundreds of lovely pieces of designer brass each week from people’s homes, nor is it even remotely odd to find tools and other useful, useable objects from the past and the present.  As I sit writing this I stare out on the lot, full of old horse drawn implements, ghosts of a long distant past.  A working wringer washing sits quite now.  A claw foot tub waits for its next home sitting among the broken waited parts and pieces of the modern world.   

It is amazing the amount of waste we create and how little we reuse, perhaps if we thought before tossing the world would be a calmer place, but what I have learned by being here is the opposite of this, we are all in a race of more and more stuff, newer stuff, etc.  There is no winner to this race, and the people who come and return these items to their former glory, and they are far and few.  Most people who pick our yard are doing just that, picking and selling old stuff to the highest bidder, most of the items have long since lost the use they were intended for and now sit upon a shelf to be looked upon with wonder and awe.  How will the next generation know who we are, by our trash of course and what they will learn is that we were never happy and never content, that color motivated us more than function and how we made our lives busy with stuff.