The owner of the long-empty, badly-renovated corner house next to me recently hired a contractor to replace the decking in the back yard with a grim concrete pad. The workers put three the house’s three big wheelie bins out front of the house, one of the bins containing neatly packed trash in bags, one (blue, with RECYCLING written on it in white) with paper, cans, glass, and plastic, and one bin named up past the top, full, helter-skelter, with all the rest of the detritus they had around, including some planks and an assortment of garbage, food waste, cans, and unidentifiable discards.

We have two trash collections a week, officially. One is Friday, when one truck takes trash and a different one takes recycling, and the other collection (generally ignored by most of the inhabitants, because it’s a recent innovation) is Tuesday. The contractor, or the owner, or the property manager, whoever had filled the cans, had done it wrong. There are official rules. One of the rules is that you don’t put the cans out until after 6:30 or so on the evening before collection. The other rule is that you place the cans neatly on the curb where the sanitation workers can tell they are meant to be emptied, and they had left them against the house.

They had don’t neither.

Of course, what happened next was that the cans remained shoved against the house front and passing neighbors, driven by faint and largely unconscious impulses, shoved their soda cans and snack wrappers in between the lumber bits and the crumpled boxes. Every fastidious bougie dog-walker in the neighborhood neatly deposited their little blue-plastic bundles of dog-shit into the remaining interstices instead of taking them home to put in their own trash cans. This is an unwritten tradition and inevitable, even though it irritates every homeowner beyond reason.

The night before the Friday collection, I sighed and dragged the bins, unwieldy despite their wheels, up to the curb. The next day, our sanitation workers took the bagged trash and the recycling workers took the recycling, but both of them left the messy, full-up bin un-emptied on the curb, and there it stayed. I dragged the empty up against the front of the house to, hopefully, be gathered up by the owner. The full-up bin, though, stayed on the curb for a week, cooking.

I reported the neglected container to the city non-emergency number, because I do everything I can to irritate the absentee owner into doing something about that house.

For whatever reason, the sanitation workers took everything yesterday, thank goodness. An exasperated neighbor from up the street threw the empty recycling bin over the back fence of the corner house after the recycling truck passed.

A sludge of bottles, cans, garbage and shit still remained in the helter-skelter can, stuck to the bottom, because there was only so much you can expect the fast-moving trash collectors to do when they have lots of blocks to clear and a bellowing monster of a truck in steady motion.

After collection, adult kid and I went out to wrangle the remaining cans. I had to tip the sludge in the messy, well-simmered can into a trash bag. My kid helped me. The odor was both peculiar and instantly recognizable, a cocktail of hot, aged, well-cured unoxygenated feces and rotting fragments of food.

The grandson was enlisted to dump a bucket over the resulting stain, and my kid had to go take a shower.

Now the nice concrete pad in the empty house has three huge trash bins flung all over it, doubtless leaving stains, and the front of the house has a fermenting trash bag puddled against the front, where it will stay until Monday night when I drag it hopefully to the curb for the (theoretical) Tuesday collection. If it doesn’t get taken, someone will drop a soda can on top of it, or one of the flyers that grocery stores pay unemployed people to shove onto our stoops.

We depend so heavily on the discretion of the people who take our trash away, and we treat them with fastidious distaste and denial, as if they were not people, but really, we shouldn’t expect anyone, no matter what they do, no matter who they are, whether athletic guy in stained overalls or elderly neighbor with a bad shoulder, to have to deal with a foul-smelling disaster like that.

It’s as if we are dogs who, having defecated, industriously kicked over our excretions and trot away, leaving them for someone else to deal with.