Garbage Truck

Yesterday I rode my bicycle through several neighborhoods on a route I have taken numerous times. But apparently, never on a Tuesday. I would have remembered.

Tuesday is trash day for two of the neighborhoods, and no matter which way I turned, I kept finding myself riding smack dab behind a garbage truck. There is no escaping the aroma when in the wake of a garbage truck.

It got me thinking about wakes. The aroma, the trail, the detritus, the good, the bad, and the ugly we leave behind us. “Who was that masked man?” folks would say in the wake of the Lone Ranger. As we walk through our day (even our kitchen!), what is it like to be in our own wake? How do we make people feel? Do we create more problems than we solve?  

I was a Girl Scout, and the scouts have a motto that challenges us to “leave a place better than we found it.” It is still a good challenge, and I am embarrassed by, not just how often I have failed, but how infrequently I even gave it a consideration.  

From birth to death, we leave a wake. The poet William Wordsworth (could there be a better last name for a poet?), wrote that at our birth, we enter the world not “in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.”  

If we arrive in this world still wrapped in glory, we tend to leave it caught up in a fog. As we age, we are asked what we want to be our legacy. This time I think of the poet who wrote the 23rd psalm. It closes with “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…” What confidence the psalmist has about his or her wake! Imagine if we all trailed goodness and mercy behind us in our wake! 

The best part about goodness and mercy is that anyone can offer them. They don’t require special training. We all strengthen or diminish the life around us. Even the wake of a garbage truck leaves behind a tidier, less burdened, and sweeter smelling tomorrow.