Here it comes. There is one thing I DON’T like about Lawrence. Something I find beyond comprehension. The city does not provide curbside recycling.

In Rockville, Md., from whence I recently came, the city discovered it actually saved money by picking up recyclables. The city cut its need for landfill space in half. In Rockville, recycling was not a choice. It was the law. The city provided the bins. Minimal sorting – one bin for paper, all kinds of paper; another for glass and plastic. Large items like cardboard boxes had to be broken down flat. Once a week, the trucks came by to pick up curbside. In our neighborhood, it was Monday morning.

I became obsessive about recycling. All week long I tossed things in the bins. Every Sunday night I dragged them to the curb. Every Monday morning when the truck pulled out of our cul de sac, I felt cleansed. Made whole.

I still recycle, dragging it out to my car, driving to Wal-Mart, darting from opening to opening, trying to figure out the difference between translucent and opaque, aluminum and steel, and whether a wine bottle is green or brown. It’s maddening, but I do it. I don’t feel cleansed afterward, I just feel drenched – and sticky. Syrupy fluids will drip out of pop cans no matter how much you rinse them. And, inevitably, I drive home with my hands sticking to the steering wheel.

My mother used to recycle. She didn’t call it that, but everything got recycled in some way in our home. She believed that if you were creative enough you could always find a purpose for every piece of trash. That came from living through the Great Depression, not some environmental consciousness.

When she and my father moved to a small apartment in Denver, I tried to clean out her kitchen and help pack. I counted 58 plastic margarine tubs. She wouldn’t let me throw them out.

“Mom, there is no way you will ever have 58 bits of leftovers to store at one time.” I pleaded with her. I tried to convince her to keep only 10. She wouldn’t go for it. I finally got her to agree to keeping 20. Then I caught on. It wasn’t that she needed so many. She just couldn’t abide the thought of throwing out something that was useful. So I changed tactics. I told her I “needed” them for myself. She would never have given them up otherwise. I took the plastic containers, drove away and then tossed them. I did that with a few other things. There was no other way to fit her into a smaller apartment.

Having just moved from a 4,000-square-foot house to a 900-square-foot one, I understand her pain. But my paring down was not nearly the emotional battle that it was for her. I did not live through the Depression – at least not the 1930s kind of one.

Actually, Lawrencians do my mother’s kind of recycling – with a vengeance. I have only recently discovered the garage sale underground. Some of you wait with anticipation for the garage sale locator map printed in Friday’s papers, then are up early Saturday morning going from place to place, where incredible junk is being recycled. So the stuff gets bought up, probably to reappear at another garage sale two years later when the garage sale junkies figure out they’ve loaded their homes with way too much flotsam.

I myself a time or two have become caught up in the Lawrence garage sale mania. One recent Saturday morning I bought a brass lamp for $3 and a Thomas Kinkade sofa throw for $5. The thing is, I dislike Thomas Kinkade “art.” Whatever got into me? All sanity goes out the window by the time you hit the third or fourth garage sale.

Living out in the country again, I have a new appreciation for recycling. Nature does it everywhere I look. And I do my best to facilitate it – like composting, a fancy name for letting garbage rot in the yard. I throw crickets out of the house after my cat gets bored chasing them, and they get recycled by the birds. I also started doing something we used to do on the farm, sweeping stuff out the back door instead of into a dust pan – it’s usually only dead roly-poly bugs anyway. But I felt really guilty when I shook out my white Flokati rug on the front porch. It’s made of New Zealand wool but looks more like it sourced from a long-haired cat than a lamb. I felt really guilty about doing it, since long white fibers were released into the yard to stick on bushes.

One morning last spring, I saw a curious-looking little gray bird, her beak full of those white fibers, hopping about snapping up more little white hairs until her beak could hold no more. Then she would fly away, returning shortly for more. I looked the bird up in my “Birds of Kansas” field guide. Gray, white breast with a touch of rust on its belly, black beak, funny pointed tuft on its head – it was a tufted titmouse. Then I saw at the bottom of the description: “Notorious for pulling hair from sleeping dogs, cats and squirrels to line their nests.”

Wow, I was doing a big service, not only to the titmouse, but also to all sleeping dogs and cats. I would never again feel guilty about shaking out the rug on the front porch.

Nature recycles. It is the way of the Earth. Life on this planet was fine until we came along and invented non-biodegradable stuff and converted to the religion of Consumerism. We invent ways to use materials even when we don’t need them, packaging little plastic things in endless layers of more plastic, just to display it in stores and also make it hard for someone to steal the little plastic things sealed inside all the other layers of plastic. But until we accidentally blow ourselves up, blasting mankind back into the dark ages – if we survive at all, we will keep accumulating trash. The least we can do is recycle as much of it as possible.

City of Lawrence, get with it. Provide curbside recycling. Make it the law. Help us (yes, force us) to turn our trash into new stuff that we can then trash – I mean recycle – again.