I spent a couple of hours Saturday cleaning up the road leading into our neighborhood while Vince was at work. I filled seven large 55 gallon trash bags full of about seven months worth of other people’s garbage. I say seven months worth because that’s about when Vince and I last cleaned it up.

We’re doers.

A lot of people stopped to thank me, which was awesome. One guy took the trash bags away. Awesome. Another guy stopped and said he had “hoped” him and his son could get out there and do it when it got warm enough. One guy thanked me and told me he had “hoped” the county would do more to keep it clean. It got me thinking a lot about hope and how little people’s hope gets things done. If you think about it, you see the most desperate expressions of hope in some of the worst neighborhoods where I guess everyone is collectively hoping that someone else will get things done and make things better. And hope never gets it done.

Besides the abundance of Marlboro cigarette packs, McDonalds and Taco Bell trash, and various beer bottles, the most common items were numerous 16 oz. plastic bottles of Mt. Dew and Chick-fil-A garbage. What kind of person tosses their garbage out of their car window in their own neighborhood?

I got my answer. Hopers.

Scattered along the road were various pieces of mail that all went back to one man who lives several houses down from us. After I was done, I drove by the address to see who it was, and I was shocked to see it was the guy who thanked me and talked to me about hoping the county government would do its job.

Between the Mt. Dew, Chick-fil-A garbage and this guy’s personal trash, I don’t think our neighborhood could handle seven more months of hope. In the end, it took a doer to clean up this mess.