Vummunhood and Recycling

Hazel Oden, winner of the 2002 POH Super Recycler Award, is one great vummun. Just about every Friday for the past 12 years she’s backed out of her driveway with a trunk full of stuff that she takes to a second hand store. Not her stuff, mind you, but everybody else’s. While we’ve all been busy slurping beverages out of recyclable containers, she’s been busy sorting, mending, pre-soaking, whitening, folding, marking, fixing and evaluating the usefulness of everyone else’s discarded stuff. Let’s do the math: 10 cubic feet of trunk space x 1 trip per week x 52 trips per year x 12 years = 6240 cubic feet of STUFF. That’s a lot of STUFF!

Not everything bears the little recyclable symbol. This always causes me a bit of discomfort. If it’s not going to be picked up or decompose in the back yard what should I do with it? For example, the large, stuffed white gorilla my husband’s best man bequeathed to us on our wedding day. Or the pair of – in our case, useless- potty chairs I had hoped would woo our boys into putting things into the right places. Or the twelve boxes of perfectly good, but forgotten, stationery collected over the past 20 years. Two extra knife blocks. 45 pairs of out-grown, but hardly, worn infant socks. Developmental baby toys. Yet-to-be-knitted reams of yarn. Great scraps of fabric. Clothing not worn anymore. Extra dishes. Pans. Stuff. Stuff. Stuff. How in the world did it all pile up?

Occasionally I try to purge our house of stuff. I wade through an area of clutter, decide what is really needed or useful or of sentimental value; then I wash and/or repair it, and at last decide where to put it. The leftover old stuff still has value, but now comes the task of putting it back to use in someone else’s life. Dumping stuff in the dumpster before it’s "dead" just to get rid of it seems wrong.

Hazel, winner of POH’s Super Recycler Award, comes to the rescue. Being her neighbor for the past eight years, I’ve been able to simply tote my old stuff across the backyard and deposit it into Hazel’s large trunk. On Friday morning she backs out of her driveway and off goes my old stuff to a new life instead of the garbage heap. It’s easier than a garage sale and I get back to a slightly less stuff-encumbered life. Hazel, along with the help of others, then implement their skills of vummunhood to put value back into my old stuff. They sort through everything, perceive what is useful and make it presentable for selling.

The task of inventorying and maintaining household items is a primal function of Vummunhood. Being a vummun requires you know where the stuff is. You control the procurement and flow of socks and underwear, spoons, refrigerated items, towels, medicines, cleaning supplies, etc., etc. You don’t have to necessarily be the kind of person who is good at such organizational tasks. Once you’re a vummun, you get crowned with the job anyway. And if you are someone who’s good at doing these things efficiently, it may be hard for anyone else to tell you’re actually doing the job. Somehow you’ve found a place for everything and the replacement roll of TP is always within reach, but no one really notices. The servant staff in Gosford Park demonstrates a professional version of these vummunhood skills. While watching the flick I thought, how utterly practical to have an entire staff doing this work. Being of the less-than-efficient type of organizer, I could use a Mrs. Wilson.

Our efforts to raise recycling awareness, to make and package things in recyclable materials, organize recycling pick-ups, etc. are admirable and essential. The irony seems to be that we just keep inventing and reinventing our need for more and more things that will inevitably be thrown away - if they’re not recycled. I think the modern concept of recycling is born of vummunhood; it is born of sorting, organizing, cleaning, repairing and making household items useful.

Well, it’s time for an abrupt ending. My troops are home and will be asking for food. As always, your comments and contributions to Vummunhood are most welcome. This vummun’s gonna fry some bacon….

Previously

• First Vummanhood column
• The October Vumman