Reuse and Recycle

Last Friday while my husband and I were taking out the recycling, we noticed a nondescript box sitting out next to the garbage dumpsters. We presumed it was intended to go out for paper collection, and we thought we'd do our neighbor a favor and bring it to the curb.

Before we did, though, I peeked inside, just to be sure it was really for recycling. It was full of magazines. I slid one out to look at the title. Cooking magazines. From the late 80's. It was full of them. I groaned. My husband laughed at me. He knows I have a weakness for cooking magazines.

Our elderly downstairs neighbor, a very dear friend, passed away about a month ago, and her children have been sorting through her old things, leaving piles of stuff on the curb for garbage. Not out of any disrespect, but purely from the perspective of one with little income and a family to care for, I often looked at those bulging black bags and wondered what little treasures were being discarded, things that might be useful with a little bit of ingenuity. I have resisted picking through them, like a vagabond on my own property. And then we found those magazines. I just couldn't toss them all out without at least looking through them. What if my next favorite dish was hiding between those warped and yellowing pages? Bless my husband, he usually tries to counteract my pack-rat nature, but this time he chuckled and helped me transfer the magazines from their rain damaged box into a dry one we had on hand so we could haul it upstairs. I told him I felt a little like the pilfering sneaks in "A Christmas Carol," taking the bed curtains from the home of the departed Scrooge. Silently I begged my neighbor's forgiveness for saving her twenty-year-old copies of "Food & Wine" and "Bon Appetit" from the recycling pile. I'd like to believe she would have given them to me whole-heartedly. She was that kind of woman. Later I realized with a twinge of regret that in all the times I used to sit and visit with her, we never talked about cooking. I think it came up in conversation once that I enjoyed cooking, and she seemed surprised, or at least intrigued. It's obvious from the fact that she subscribed to both these magazines simultaneously, and kept them for all these years, that she must have enjoyed it, too, although while I knew her she was so limited by diet restrictions and lack of mobility that she didn't cook much. I wish now that we had talked about it more. I would have really enjoyed that.

Will I get to look through all these magazines before I toss them back into the recycling? Probably not. Will I ever cook the recipes I tear out and file away? Maybe when my kids are older and less picky, but that's unlikely, too. So maybe I didn't really gain any new recipes from this little episode, but there are two things I'm taking away from it instead: I love that even though I know it drives him crazy when I save things that ought to just be thrown away, my husband let me keep those magazines, and even helped me do it, just because he knows me, and what delights me. And secondly, I have learned that I need to dig a little deeper in my friendships if I really want to uncover the treasures.