Telephone book dumpsters

I was doing my morning rounds---walking horses to the pasture, watering the new grass seeding checking for ripening tomatoes, looking for fall photos.

The one above certainly sent the message that fall's on the way as the bush continues to turn a more brilliant hot pink each day. I love the morning when everything seems so peaceful and refreshingly beautiful here in the Selle Valley.

Today, however, my pastoral morning stroll in this peaceful valley was tarnished by corporate blight.

After snapping some photos of the shrubbery, the garden and the overloaded apple trees, I walked over to get the morning papers. Something white in the ditch below caught my eye.

"Oh, they did dump something here," I thought to myself. "Creeps!"

Two days ago my sisters and I were visiting on the deck while our mean dogs chased each other and played in the kiddie pool, which was full of water.

We were yakking away when a white van came down the road from the north and slowed down as if to stop at the mailbox.

"You'd better not!" I yelled in the midst of the conversation, watching the van. My sisters were a bit dumbfounded with my interruption. I explained to them that those people in that van had better not leave something in the mailbox---ON a Sunday, no less.

The van moved on as did our visit. Later, I rode Lily down the road in the direction from which the van had come. At nearly every residence was a white plastic bag, thrown on the road in the vicinity of mailboxes.

The sight made me mad and also reminded me of how ugly it had been to drive our country roads this past spring where dozens of telephone books in white plastic bags had been dropped near mailboxes, most of which had been left there to deteriorate as litter.

I thought we Loves had been spared this time because the van driver may have thought twice about dumping after seeing us on the deck, but this morning's sighting reminded me of just how lazy and disrespectful of the environment these phonebook producers are.

My first inclination was to just leave the phonebook in the ditch, as a personal protest, but who was gonna suffer? Not the phonebook producer. They'd already done their pimping to get the books out. Their garbage simply would turn into our responsibility.

I walked inside with the papers and told Bill about the dumping at our mailbox. We both assumed it was another Hagadone directory Black Book. I believe those were the ones which littered the roads last spring, but please correct me if they weren't.

I went out later with my camera, pulled the white plastic bag from the ditch, opened it up and discovered that the contents came from Verizon, the phone company. The book was our annual official phone book, which we've gotten for years---INSIDE OUR MAILBOX--not thown in our ditch on a Sunday afternoon by a white van driver.

Now, if this were another government program with funds for such activities getting sliced and diced, I might understand the reason for not putting the phonebook inside the mailbox rather than dumping it in the road or the ditch.

But these are private corporate enterprises who sanction this practice. Is there a law that allows them to dump their stuff rather than going through the normal channels of sending it through the mail?

If there is, the law needs to be repealed.

If there is not, these companies need to repeal their practices, show some respect for the environment and avoid cutting corners as they deliver their products via dumping.