Well, now I’ve heard everything. Today at work we actually ran out of trash to be sorted, so they let us go at 11:00 a.m.! We ran out — in the kingdom of trash! The enormous bay where they keep the incoming was totally empty. I’ve never seen it in that state. It looked like Whoville after the Grinch stole Christmas! There was not so much as a crumb for my-man-the-rat! I’m sure they’ll be getting more in tonight, though, so we’ll be up and running tomorrow. They’re probably calling emergency trash delivery services all over the eastern U.S.

Except we mustn’t call it “trash” — Gizmo corrected me today. It’s properly called “comingle,” spelled that way, and pronounced with a long o. Comingle is the wondrously-varied material we process, which is a pretty good name for it. The rivers that flow into Greenstar are the melting-pots of the world. When we’re done with it, then it’s “trash.” Trash is what I throw into my bin and empty into the trash shaft. Trash is what we pull out of the comingle. But I guess in the world of professional recycling, calling comingle “trash” is like being in the service and calling your piece a “gun.” Heh, heh! Good thing the boss didn’t hear me!

Ah, comingle . . . in the trailer today, guys were swapping stories about the worst things that have landed on them and the worst smells they’ve encountered. Spider had the ultimate tale, involving a dead raccoon, though I won’t describe exactly what the encounter left all over him. Apparently they’ve seen dead sheep, too, and a bunch of dead turkeys all at once. I’ve heard tales of deer. Yes, recycling dead farm and forest animals is a really great idea. More people should do it. I’ve found that a good many people treat recycling bins as magical portals into which to throw anything you want to disappear from your life.

So . . . sad to report it, but yesterday, for the first time, I had my own first dead animal experience on the line. In the bottom of my field of vision, I glimpsed what I thought was a wad of rags. I had just laid hold of it when I saw it clearly: a very large, shiny black dead rat. (Rest its soul!) I exhibited the typical human reaction — I let go of it quickly. It went on down the line, and I watched the reaction of the guy backing me up. You could see the process of him seeing it, the split-second of the sight sinking in, and then he jumped backwards about two feet. Then he started excitedly telling everyone within earshot and looking to me for confirmation.

My-poor-man-the-rat drifted on down the line with the river of paper and went over the falls. I suppose that’s a good and fitting funeral for a Greenstar rat. Like Boromir at Rauros.

But anyway, these last two days have been balmy — up in the fifties and sixties, after a terrible week in the teens — and it’s been wonderful wearing jeans again, not being encumbered with a bulky coat, not having frozen gloves . . . some of the summer fun of Greenstar has come back, and I’ve been enjoying it for all it’s worth.

Yesterday morning was foggy — so foggy in the pre-dawn dark that I could see very little around the car but curtains of white as I drove to work. Even when the sun rose, the world was all veiled and vaporous beyond the open doors of the plant. At the first break, I always enjoy looking up at the mountain across the Ohio River (“I will lift up my eyes to the hills; from where does my help come?”) — I like seeing how the trees look, and watching the birds wheel in the sky. I like being reminded of the world of nature all around our circles of human endeavor. Out there is where my book seems to be rooted, this novel I peck away at. Even when they’re set indoors, like this one mostly is, they’re rooted out there. That’s where they draw their life from.

Since I had the half-day off today, I wrote. One must use gifts. 753 words today — not spectacular, but great for a couple hours on a free afternoon — terrific for a day on which I’d never dreamed in the morning that I’d be writing! Gross total: 124,661. It’s going to be a hefty book, even after the shortening of editing. Oh, for three weeks to do nothing but write!

But back to the strangely magical world of the recycling plant . . .

Cleanup is an endless process there. Cans, bottles, shreds of plastic, and other bits of detritus rain constantly from the seams and over the walls of the thundering belts. Some of these things snag on the machinery and on the support girders, some accumulate on the catwalks, and some make it all the way down to the floor. My area of specialty lately has become the catwalks, simply because I’m the guy who likes to do it. Today, after about half an hour of regular work in the morning, we had to keep ourselves busy finding stuff to clean up. Even though there was no comingle, there was plenty of other material going through the plant — cans, bottles, cardboard . . . I could see other guys in other distant perches sorting away on their belts. I just kept making a circuit, my three catwalks, the High Place, the main floor, around the baler, under the paper line, back to the catwalks . . . I cleaned them off three or four times.

There’s a cool little place I think of as the Shrine of the Saint. It’s a place where short flights of metal stairs go down in two directions from a landing that accesses one of the lower belts; it’s a tight, dark little corner that can get frightfully full of trash and that often needs cleaning out. Well, the guys who labor at the plant have a sense of reverence for certain objects, which is nice to see. In the Shrine, someone found a plastic figure of one of the Wise Men from a Nativity scene. It’s about two feet high, molded plastic, full color; without the other two Wise Men to compare it to, I’m not sure which gift this one is bringing. Anyway, someone found it, and no one wants to throw it away, so it’s been set up in a little niche in the wall there. I like how it represents some sort of respect, some bowing of the head to holiness, and thus brings a blessing to that little corner of the dirty, rumbling world. Long may the Saint kneel with his gift atop the pillar of concrete!

Tomorrow, it’s back to winter. The temperature is supposed to plummet to about freezing, and on down past that for Friday. But it’s been a good little respite here in the wintry Uncanny City.