Trash Fairy

Dear Neighbors, maybe it’s something I missed growing up. You know, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I did figure out the Tooth Fairy thing before my first children started losing teeth, but I really thought when I moved to Haversham that there was a Trash Fairy that lived somewhere over at the pool or the party house.

A Trash Fairy. You know, some creature endowed with special powers, whose sole purpose in life is to pick up trash and dispose of it. We had one around our house all the time we were growing up. Just ask my sisters. I really thought there was one in Haversham.

That is, until today.

I am sad to report there is no Trash Fairy in Haversham. We looked.

I looked. My grandsons looked. My husband even got off his computer long enough to come over and look.

We looked in the trash can itself, among all the trash and the foul-smelling refuse of someone’s party. No Trash Fairy.

We looked among the trash can liners that were neatly placed next to the trash can waiting to be promoted into liner status so they could fulfill the measure of their creation. Not there.

Neither among the trash and refuse in the bushes nor among the toys scattered about the pool deck could we find the Trash Fairy.

So we swept aside the cigarette butts, the used band-aids the hair clips and such because my grandson said fairies can make themselves really small. But the Trash Fairy was not there.

My other grandson hypothesized that maybe the fairy HAD BEEN in the trash can but got hit by one of the bottles thrown into it and maybe that’s why we had a rule in the first place against having bottles at the pool because bottles are like Kryptonite to the Trash Fairy. So we pulled all that putrid stuff out of the can, put it into a can liner, and hauled it off to the dumpster. No Fairy.

My husband said I smelled like garbage. Then he suggested maybe someone like terror-extortionists had kidnapped the Trash Fairy and we should look for a ransom note. Couldn’t find one. Clearly our belief in a Trash Fairy was misplaced.

We were dejected.

Then we got to thinking, maybe other Haversham neighbors believed in the Trash Fairy too. And that explained why they left so much terrible junk everywhere and didn’t understand about can liners or anything. That’s the only rationale we could find for the mess everywhere.

But there is no Trash Fairy. We are certain.