It is once again that time of year when suburban residents are encouraged to place any rubbish too large for the Otto bins which are the repositories of weekly household refuse on the nature strips which run, in Sydney, betwixt footpath and street. The rubbish may only be put out in the week leading up to the date the local Council has scheduled as its cleanup day, and as the piles start to go out you see drivers in big, beat-up old station wagons and sometimes big, beat-up old trucks slowly driving the streets...
The reason for the drivers is because I like to think of this week's lead-up to the Council cleanup as a vast communal sharing, something of a giant swap-meet, as, between the broken plant pots on one side and the degraded leatherette sofa on the other, there is often treasure to be found for anyone who is not proud, has a little imagination and a vehicle large enough to cart off discovered treasures.
I have managed to furnish a good bit of my house with things I have on the side of the road, unwanted by someone who had obviously upgraded to something better or at least newer and was too impatient to be rid of the old even to wait for eBay to consume the things that, once loved, have been obliterated by the shine of New Stuff. There is the beautiful wooden crate which, topped by a large sheet of glass I found in another cleanup, makes a rustic coffee table; the small cupboard which, when I painted it and added wrought-iron handles, makes a beautiful DVD cabinet; the lovely wooden TV cabinet which I measured to make sure it would fit in my house and then, when I had wrestled it over to the back of my car found it wouldn't fit, and had to call for backup; and the chair I'm sitting in now, the one I always say I'm going to grow old in.
The thing I particularly like about Council cleanups is you never know what you might find - you have to view things with an eye of grace and to be quick and decisive - while many wait for night to fall to go back and claim things they've eyeballed during the day, individuals with less shame generally swoop in as soon as they find something.
What I've learnt from this is that it's better to claim something with potential immediately - if, by the time you get it home, it doesn't fit into the space you thought it would be perfect for, or, on closer examination or in better light it shows flaws which would be too difficult or disproportionally expensive to fix - you can just throw it back into the Council cleanup sea by putting it on your kerb (assuming, of course, that it is Council cleanup time in your area - be careful about this, many Sydney councils now impose heavy fines for illegally dumped rubbish).
In a really good Council cleanup, there is almost a festival air as people on morning walks stop to glance through the unwanted things of their neighbours, triumphantly carrying off unexpected treasures - and for the environmentally-aware, there is the added knowledge that you have saved something still in good condition from ending up in landfill while eliminating the need to buy that particular thing new from some shop, thus saving the production and transport costs associated with such purchase.
So, when you next start to see the piles of unwanted things appearing on nearby streets, take a walk, pocket your pride and venture into the land of opportunity.