In part one, the trailer and truck of a never-before-seen moving company, one not in the telephone book, dragged and crushed our official City of Austin trashcart.

Although a suburban-type person helpfully suggested that, for the week before a replacement of some sort appears, odiferous trash should be kept in the garage, that’s advice that helps people who have a garage, not a person living in a part of Austin developed during the streetcar era.

So we reactivated the thirty-gallon galvanized metal trashcans that Twin Oaks Hardware used to sell, dumping out the little pots in which to start seedlings and disturbing the homelife of the resident geckos. These were the trashcans in use before the advent of the self-dumping plastic trashcarts, back in the days when our tax dollars paid for twice-a-week collection. We put a cinderblock atop the can and hope that some especially strong and intelligent raccoon or fox doesn’t see fit to dislodge it.