The street I live on joins two main roads to the highway. It’s never still. And yet we sit on a large, wild, well-wooded lot. The traffic swirls round our little slum bungalow. The traffic hums - it doesn’t scream like at my downtown office - but there is not a minute’s peace. What I wouldn’t give for a moment’s stillness and I catch just a moment’s epiphany in the beagle’s eye as the day spills by. The beagle’s nose is dirty. She’s been digging. We’re tidying the back garden, raking through layers of refuse. I need to get the rake, and I try not to be afraid to go into the basement - the basement threatens to be full of shit of backed-up sewers.

Oh, I’m not a practical man, and that’s a curse, but I’m cleaning up the basement. Cleaning up the shit.

Sue says she’s learning to turn shit to compost.

The rake. The rakings of the lawn (less a bottle cap or two) are somewhere between good kindling and good mulch. Organic refuse. Beyond the fence the refuse grows thicker and more serious. The back of the lot spills down through trees and scrub to Mimico Creek and childhood. The dumping there is mile high: old tires, empty and half empty tins, bricks and bottles mid deer and fox and badger play - badgers in my imagination, which never stops producing rubbish, refuse. Garbage. The sandman is coming to take it all away. The sun is setting. The beagle’s gone in doors, and the moment is still with crickets, bird call, squirrel leap, trees cloud sky...and traffic.