How long was my yard the dumping ground for the ex-gardener’s old clunker of a pickup? Four or five months, right? I should never have let it go on that long, but first his family told me they were going to take care of it, and later my landlord said he would handle it. Four or five months later, the sheriff came and carted it away.

Now I have a new problem, which I hope doesn’t become a four or five month old problem in, say, four or five months. Someone has dumped the remnants of a decrepit baby crib at the entrance to my driveway. It’s a big pile of metal and wood, and it has now been there since either Saturday night or Sunday morning. It wasn’t there when I got back from the post office Saturday afternoon, but when Tammy and Aiden came by Sunday morning, she told me about it.

And after telling her I’d do something with it, I promptly forgot all about it, until I was leaving for the post office this morning. (On a side note, the main reason I have the company mail delivered to a post office box and not here is so that I have a reason to get out of the house at least once a day. Otherwise, I might be even more of a hermit than I already am.)

It’s not exactly in the way, and it’s not exactly on my part of the property. I share the driveway entrance with the landlord’s gigundis shed in the lot next door. The crib parts block his gate much more than they block me out of my driveway, so it’s his problem. We all know how well he responds to problems. If he can get around it, or find another way onto the lot, that pile of junk will probably be there for four or five months.

When I walked out to the mailbox this afternoon, I tried to move the pile a little more out of my way (and a little more into the landlord’s way). I probably moved it all less than a foot, but as I said, it’s not really blocking me out. I’d hate to have a delivery driver think that he couldn’t get into my driveway, especially at this sensitive time of year. That’s the main reason I even tried to move it, but it was so heavy that I had to give up. Which I did. And now it’s not my problem, any more than the gardener’s truck is my problem, wherever it ended up.