I am in my last week of the Basics of Photography course at the University of Maryland Global Campus. The last assignment was to pick a theme, then go out into the world and document it through photography. I started out with ‘Weight Loss’ because that would include eating and walking, but during the walking part my theme changed to ‘The Trash We Leave’.

I am always amazed at how beautiful our world is and I am especially enamored with the sights I see in our little Charles County, MD. On a walk that my friend Raymond and I took a few weeks ago, we found some nice roads that we have never gone down. Traveling to unknown places can always be risky, but we are old, adventurous, and a little crazy, so we travel to your neighborhood. Getting back to ‘The Trash We Leave”, there are endless reasons why I can leave my trash for you to pick up. Here are just a few: the trash containers provided are full, I left it close enough, or it is not my problem.

It seems trash cans are everywhere now, but not always timely emptied. How hard would it be to recognize those more active days or weekends and empty them prior to and after those times? The stance of it is close enough is not the right attitude and it is not job security for someone else, especially if it blows all over the area. IT IS MY PROBLEM! It is lazy and sloppy to leave my trash for someone else to clean up. We as a people have gone to extremes to depose our trash and rubbish in designated areas and we are starting to get the recycling idea down to a science. Everyone should help and do their part in both of those arenas before we have no clean places to walk. “Our trash – our problem!” (McDonald)