Earning A Free Ride to Mars (Including a Lesson on Prayer)

We never got around to doing the apartment cleaning that I intended for us to do on Saturday. Instead, we decided to focus our efforts on our recycling. A bit of background: when Ammon started kindergarten last year, one of the first units that his class did was about recycling. He came home and announced that we weren't doing our part to save the earth by recycling. So we started! At the time, we lived upstairs with an empty workroom next door to us. It was very easy to daily take our recycling to that room, let it accumulate and then periodically take it to the transfer site to recycle it. Now, we live downstairs and the trek up the stairs and to the workroom is a bit more of a hassle. But we still do it (it's amazing what guilt will do to you once you've recycled and then feel like stopping!). We even have our little old neighbor, Buford, contributing all his soda cans to our cause! Whenever we use tin cans, plastic bottles, milk jugs, cardboard boxes, etc., they end up in a very messy pile underneath our kitchen sink (we need a better system for this part). When it starts to overflow, we stick it all in a bag and somebody runs upstairs to throw it (literally) into the workroom. Well... the workroom was overflowing (again, literally), and we decided it was time to sort, bag and take everything to the transfer site.

The kids had fun sorting everything. They were amazed at how much milk we drink, how much canned fruit we consume, how many eggs we eat, and how much other stuff we use. I was, too. (By the way, I think that as a society, we totally overdo it on our food packaging!) It took us a while, but we finally got it all packed in our car. The whole time we were doing all of this, I kept thinking of Long Beach, where the city provides a gray trash can and a blue one for recycling and both are picked up weekly. It was sooo easy! I also thought about the short time I lived with my grandma in San Jose, where you actually get fined if your recycling bins aren't used. Oh well... kudos to them!

As we were leaving home, we realized that the keys we'd used to get into the workroom were suddenly missing. All fingers pointed to little Ziya, who was last seen playing with the keys. We checked her pockets (she's a "stasher") but to no avail. This was extremely stressful, since these are a set of master keys that open every single door in the apartment building (including our own home!). My immediate thought is that they were buried in one of the many bags of our recycling stuff. We said a prayer in the car asking Heavenly Father to please help us find our keys, and then we continued on to the Soldotna transfer site.

We gingerly emptied all our bags into the appropriate bins (the boys absolutely dig this part!), first shaking everything to make sure the keys weren't lodged in a can or box somewhere. I was really starting to get nervous as I pulled out the last bag of plastic stuff. It was a real pain to take out bottle by bottle and jar by jar, but there, at the very bottom of the bag was our set of master keys! Hooray! It was as if Heavenly Father just needed us to be patient and persistent until the very, very end. We passed the test! The boys were excited as we talked about the beauty and the blessing of answered prayers. It was a good opportunity for us to teach them that we can pray all we want, but we also have to do our part. I'm thankful for the experience.

I'm also thankful for an environment-conscious kindergarten teacher who helped us get this whole thing started. We all talked about how it really felt good when we left the transfer site and learned that we'd recycled about 200 pounds of stuff that could have very easily gone to a regular landfill.

Ammon came up with a scenario that might encourage others to start recycling. As we were talking to the kids about how regular garbage just gets put into the earth and it takes years and years for it to decompose, he said that he thought it would be a really good idea if in the future, when the earth gets too full of trash, all the people who recycled would get a free ride on a spaceship to go live on Mars, and all the people who did not recycle would have to stay on Earth. Hmmm... just something to think about!