Loose Screws

I have a question. Who loses one screw?

Over the years, as I’ve walked the roads of Coal Creek, I have found, variously, screws, tacks, nails, and really big nails, which someone tells me are called spikes. I always pick them up, having run over a few nails, screws, tacks and, more than once, a piece of angle iron myself. I find myself wondering, where in creation these devices-designed-for-fastening come from. Do they fall out of livestock racks? Someone’s homemade camper? Horse trailers? Bike racks?

Suspiciously, they are often found at the mouth of a drive way, or a lane, or a canal access road. Were they thrown there by a secret enemy? Or an avowed enemy for that matter? Is it the fact that there’s a little jounce as one leaves most driveway-lane-canal- access-road type pathways and return to the pavement? Hmmm, it’s a mystery. However, I consider it my neighborly duty to pick them up and carry them away before they cause harm.

Picking up things along the roadside is not new to me. Treading these back roads I have found enough toys to stock my own toy store. A long time ago I came across a magazine called “Found” that published pictures of collections of things found by people in their daily lives. It was fun to try to puzzle out the scene that led to a tear-stained love note being left under the windshield wiper on the wrong car. The picture of people in 1940’s clothing found blowing down the street. The musical score with serious profanity written all over it.

My toys were not so hard to figure out. The little plane was probably held out a window and dropped to see if it would fly. The McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, thrown away with the bag by a passing car (tsk, tsk). The pinwheel? Who needs an explanation for that?

I brought each of these, any many others, home, and put them in an old tie-dye pencil box my daughter had in third grade. At some point, I hoped to mail them all to “Found” so that they could come up with their own theory of their origins.

Alas, alack. Or is it alack, alas? Well, whatever. I made the mistake of reading a women’s magazine with an article on ridding oneself of clutter. It said that you should immediately throw away eight items. Now, did I throw away the 15 years of cancelled checks I have (from back when you still got cancelled checks)? The entire works of Larry Mc Murty (of “Lonesome Dove” fame) in paperback? The 15 coffee mugs I keep in the cupboard though I live alone? The copies of my divorce papers, my mother’s estate proceedings, or the various paid off promissory notes from my various endeavors?

No I did not. On an impulse I reached for, and threw away, the little tie-dye pencil box, with all the found toys dropped by children out car windows as they sat patiently in their little car seats, safely ensconced from harm and all human contact in the back seat, whizzing down the roads of Montrose County.

And I’ve been thinking. Why is it that we throw away so quickly the whimsical, the sentimental, and the silly? Why do we cling so tightly to the rest of it? Why do we remember with horror that moment we realized our dress was tucked into our pantyhose, re-experiencing the embarrassment and humiliation, but so quickly forget the little girl who says, “I like your pretty shoes?” Why do we catalogue every hurt and injury inflicted upon us by our loved ones, but forget the odd laugh, the worried look when we’re ill, and the unexpected caress?

I have no answers, and oddly enough, though I’ve found many screws, nails, tacks, and one more spike, while out walking, I have never yet found another toy.