By Devin Murphy

Featured Image: “Shoes” by Vincent Van Gogh

One night a month, people in my hometown outside of Buffalo, New York, put their large trash items on the curb for the sanitation department to pick up the next morning. Our neighbors would drag out old Whirlpool appliances, ironing boards, and whatever else the weekly garbage route couldn’t take. On those evenings, my Dutch immigrant mother loaded me into her rusted-over white 1970 Chevy Caprice station wagon with its vinyl side panel, and we’d slowly cruise the streets picking through the refuse.

From where I was slouching low in the passenger’s seat I’d get this fishbowl feeling as she slowed down and parked in front of those houses. Each home gave off a sense of neatness and order that seeped into their lawns. It always made me feel as if strangers were looking out their windows at us—or worse, people we knew. The idea of being watched made me want to pull my lower lip over my head and swallow myself whole. But my mother was unfazed as she picked discarded rabbit-ear antennas, steel rods, sheet metal, chicken wire, aluminum siding, rebar, large bolts, coffee cans, aluminum fruit cans, and every scrap of metal or iron and tossed them in the back of the Caprice.

She walked from lawn to lawn on the sidewalk while I inched the car along beside her. I nudged the gas pedal and braked with my tiptoes. I wasn’t big enough to see over the steering column, so I navigated through the line-of-sight between the dashboard and the top of the enormous steering wheel. When we had to cross an intersection, she’d get back in, drive across, and we’d start down the next block.