My favorite activity – recycling, so peaceful, gives me a sense of adulthood, responsibility, and the understanding that I am doing something useful. My conscious meditation, my therapy, my pleasant adult duties—taking trash bags to the trash can on the street and sorting different types of trash. 

I live in a house, and I don’t know how people in apartments manage. Maybe they take out the trash in a bag, going down with everyone in the elevator — chicken bones spill out, and the floor smells of fish oil for several days. I don’t know. In Moscow, we threw trash bags down the garbage chute. It wasn’t until I was 30 that I wondered where it went next. It turns out that it is taken by cart to large garbage bins — special ones, for each residential building. At the dacha, I don’t remember… I threw the trash into a bucket under the sink, and then I don’t know… Kolya dealt with it.

It’s not very pleasant to suddenly realize that you not only don’t know where the trash goes, but you’ve never even thought about it. 

And now, taking out the trash is my favorite ritual. I carefully tie the trash bag, put on my Crocs, and go out to my backyard. Along with a kayak, a snowboard, and a yoga mat, among the plants covering the stone fence, there are blue plastic boxes in the corner, each for a specific type of trash, and a large trash can. Nikita and I bought a new trash can. The previous one turned out to be too small and couldn’t handle our family’s waste. I piled up the trash bags and decoratively placed the lid on top of the pile. Then I left. And the birds… the birds pecked at the bags and scattered food and other waste all over the lawn. I accepted my mistake, put on gloves, took a brush, and put the torn bags into new bags. Less than five minutes later, it happened again. Birds know very well what’s in black bags, and bears, by the way, know when it’s garbage collection day and come in advance to rummage through the waste. So we bought a large garbage can. I like to keep it clean and wash it with a hose. Not only for aesthetic reasons, but also so that bears are not attracted by the smell. 

Twice! Twice I came face to face with bears near the trash can. 

One bear just walked past the trash can, saw me, got scared, and jumped into a tree. The second one knocked over the trash can and rummaged through the bottles. My bottles contained kombucha and various healthy drinks — nothing interesting, really. I ran out to him, delighted. In my yard! A bear! He was rummaging through bottles, and I had nothing to offer him… He went to my neighbors. 

I feel so responsible now and am so proud of myself: I fold the boxes along the seams so that they fit neatly into the box. I started honing this skill when I worked at Marriott on banquets. How many boxes passed through our hands: with food, new plates, tablecloths… and everything had to be torn open at the seams, carried in our arms, and taken to the warehouse. My box-folding skills reached perfection at Starbucks. I am the shift manager and am responsible for defrosting food. It comes in boxes, is stored in the freezer, and once a day it has to be taken out, unpacked, and defrosted. This process takes 30-50 minutes, which means you just unpack the boxes, lay out the food, and stack the empty boxes. There are a lot of boxes. A lot! I once watched my colleague brutally trample on a box. It had a double benefit: it was quick, and it released excess energy. Then this pile was taken out to the street in bins. And somehow it became an unspoken rule that whoever was in charge of the café at the moment would take out the trash and clean the toilets. The unspoken rule is “lead by example” — behave the way you want your subordinates to behave. However, no one warned me that this was how I should behave at the beginning of my integration into an already established team, gaining trust and earning respect. Out of habit, I took the trash — spilled milk and sauces — from the guys and ran to take it to our own Starbucks trash can around the corner. In the snow, in the rain, in the wind, with sirens blaring in the backyard… Lead by example — not just for the first month, but always.

In general, I honed my skill at folding cardboard boxes. Before, I didn’t care that they were piling up, unfolded, because it wasn’t my job to touch the trash with my hands and fold cardboard boxes, saving space and simplifying transportation. 

I also wash all the plastic containers until they shine so that they don’t attract bears and don’t stink. Aluminum cans separately. Glass separately — I also wash sauce bottles. I stack them one on top of the other. Sometimes someone comes for the glass and takes it away before the garbage collectors arrive. They also announce: on such and such a day, it’s bottle drive, bring out your glass bottles. You can take them to a bottle depot and get money for them. People collect them for travel or just for living… Just for living… To live in the most beautiful province of Canada – with the ocean, tropical forests, bears and cougars, whales and killer whales, and the endemic arbutus tree.

Once, I got really brave and went outside my comfort zone: I went to a landfill—a giant trash dump on the outskirts of town. I got brave because even with Kolya’s detailed instructions, I was afraid of doing something wrong and looking silly. At first, I went to the wrong landfill. I panicked. I started crying. I pulled myself together and drove to the right one. And it turned out to be so simple: you drive up to the window, they give you a ticket and weigh you — you, your car, and your trash. They tell you which container to drive up to. You park with the trunk facing the garbage container and dump everything out — in bags or without bags, it doesn’t matter. You can ask the consultant where to put things or ask for help to take out something bulky. Then you go back to the window, they weigh you and your car again and tell you how much you weigh without the trash. And you pay for how much trash you left there. I had so much junk after the move, but it only cost me 10 Canadian dollars. 

I was very proud of myself: that I didn’t get confused, that I responsibly took everything to the right place and didn’t just dump it somewhere in the forest, that I did something grown-up and responsible on my own, instead of hiring someone to take my trash away… Well done, and that’s all there is to it.

True, sometimes I forget when our trash is picked up. Regular containers – once a week on Thursdays. Recycling – once every two weeks on Fridays. I missed last Friday… I look again: my neighbor put everything out in front of his garage the day before, but no one else did. I thought: well, you’re the smartest, of course… You got it wrong. The whole street didn’t put anything out! But he turned out to be the smartest. Everyone put their trash out in the morning. And I only figured it out by lunchtime. It’s also interesting to look at, or rather, peek at, what kind of trash people have: what kind of boxes, what kind of bottles. You can learn so much about a whole family from their trash. Maybe someone deliberately puts expensive cardboard boxes on top so that everyone knows that a wealthy family lives here. Or, on the contrary, they only put alcohol bottles in black bags. 

I stand in my backyard, admiring the view: the most beautiful province in Canada — with the ocean, tropical forest, bears, and killer whales… In front of me is the sacred mountain of the Indians, the endemic arbutus tree; raccoons, partridges, deer. Black vultures fly by, hunting rabbits, bald eagles with a wingspan of up to two meters — they fly low, right above me. And I look at them all and at my neatly folded trash and rejoice: how responsible and clean it is. Cleanliness and routine are a step towards a conscious life and the key to a stable psyche. I’ve tried everything except medication. But most of all, I’m glad that someone is growing up after all. They say that people don’t change after 30… But some do, and how!