This is cleanup week in Thayer.

This is the week we are supposed to spruce up around the house and leave garbage that usually wouldn't be picked up out by the street.

Out my kitchen window I can see the rather small home of an elderly woman who pushes a shopping cart around town picking up aluminum cans to sell.

I looked out yesterday and the only words I could form in my head were "My God!"

There was a pile of what must have been decades of trash, some in boxes, some not, eight feet high and as long as the front border of her yard.

I call myself a hoarder, but when things get too bad I actually DO throw some things away and straighten up. I have nothing on this woman. The pile of trash was literally almost as big as her house.

Her house must be like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

I wonder if something has happened to her; I haven't seen her for a while. The last time I saw her she was pushing her cart down Vine Street for her rounds, being followed by a cat, and later that day back up Vine Street, being followed by the same cat. When was that? A month ago? Last fall? I really have no idea.

I looked at that pile with sadness. This is this woman's life, thrown out by the curb for everyone to see. These were her treasures, and each thing no doubt meant something to her. And it was all being thrown away after being on display for everyone to gawk at.

It was sad, but what happened next was just obscene.

The scavengers came.

I am not above plucking something out of these piles if it's something I'll use every year. In fact, I was eyeballing the treadmill out by the street next door, but somebody beat me to it and it disappeared.

But spotting a thing as you drive by, stopping and picking it up, is different from spending hours going through a pile of someone else's life piece by piece, and that's what the scavengers did.

Some spent literally hours sifting through this woman's trash, showing no respect for this woman's life at all. At times there were ten people or more.

It felt like I was watching a flock of vultures devour the bloated carcass of the woman herself.

In a wierd way, I kind of hope something happened to her, so she wouldn't have to feel the shame and embarrassment of the grotesque blood orgy as her life's collection was defiled.