This kid puts out two trash cans every week.....and inexplicably takes one of them in after the truck comes. The other one lives out there, and it's an eyesore, I'm tired of looking at it, and I don't understand why?!?? Just take your other damn trash can in! So I guess it's more accurate to say he puts out one trash can each week, because he never actually has to put out the second one, because it stays out.
My Mom had a backhanded way of dealing with ssimilar neighbor when us brothers were adolescents. In one of the small Midwest towns that our childhood took us through, there were known poachers next door. After quartering their offseason deer in their back shed and storing its meat in their deep freezer, the remains would get tossed into the trash can that would sit at the end of their driveway. Us brothers knew this without having to take a peek inside their garbage cans because we were classmates with the neighbor's kids, who bragged at school about (offseason) hunting trips with their Dad.
The weekly trash truck refused to take their garbage can full of mostly animal remains. They left flyers with directions to the county's Wildlife Carcass Disposal pit. So their trash can continued to stink up the end of their driveway and that's what bothered my Mom. She had a sensitive nose prone to triggering headaches, which is why us brothers were prompted to keep our fish aquariums, lizard terrarium, and the cat's litter box so clean. She wondered aloud why our neighbors didn't bury the deer remains in the vast forest behind our shared property line. (Answer: they were lazy bumpkins.)
Didn't leaving animal remains out make it their poaching more known? Which is what happened. Deputies showed up one afternoon while us brothers were shooting hoops in our driveway, and paid our neighbor's trash cans a visit. Confronted by our neighbors, the sheriff's deputies said they didn't need a warrant since the trash cans were left out in the street. By then they'd seen enough to summon the county game warden. Our neighbors were eventually investigated for poaching. Fines and misdemeanors were weighed, but our neighbors (who already had mild criminal records), hired a lawyer and easily beat potential charges by raising enough doubt, such as claiming the deer was roadkill they'd cleaned up. But the point was made: 1) Don't leave your trash cans on the street, and 2) don't let your trash cans stink over night.
A decade later, when us brothers were in our twenties, she revealed how her invisible hand contributed to this lesson on the day before deputies showed up. During one of her visits to Walmart in the next town over, she used the payphone to call the county sheriff's office to report a suspicious smell, and playing her hand as the unsuspecting housewife, she innocently worried whether the smell could be a body. Needless to say, our neighbors never again left their garbage cans out overnight.
