THE CORNER OF LOVER'S LANE & BROWN WAS A MESS!

I only have one hour to pick up trash after work, so I have to hurry.  If I want to reach my one-million-piece goal by the end of summer, every day counts.

I created a list of intersections that regularly need cleaned, and Lover's Lane & Brown is on my list.  There's a dollar store on one corner, a gas station on the other, and a taco stand in the parking lot.  Traffic is crazy, and I think there's a lot of crime in this area.  It's not an area I want to be in after dark, that's for sure.

The bushes were loaded with trash, so it took a long time to pick through the branches and get everything out, but I did.  

I picked up 1,138 pieces of trash, most of it in the bushes surrounding the dollar store parking lot.  Even with a mess this nasty, it doesn't take long to clean.  I had the trash in this picture picked up in about five minutes.  

There's no excuse for any area to look this bad.
 

Now it's clean.  My guess is some of this trash was hidden in the bushes from last summer, but now that the leaves are gone, I can see it.

April is the big clean up month for Keep Akron Beautiful.  I love that hundreds, maybe thousands of volunteers gather to pick up trash in April, but if we want to keep Akron beautiful, we need to pick up trash all year long.

Summer is when ice cream wrappers, popsicle sticks and pop cans are everywhere.  Fall is when the leaves cover most of the trash, and it's really hard to pick up.  Winter is when it's cold, and trash can't be picked up if it's covered with snow.

Spring is a great time to pick up trash.  When its wet, it's heavy, but it doesn't blow around, and you can get a lot of wet paper in a trash bag.  The leaves are not on the bushes yet, so you can see the trash. And the mowers haven't chopped the trash into hundreds of tiny pieces!

I got all the trash picked out of the bushes and when I got to the end, I saw this.  Ick!  It's going to take a few more days to get this area all cleaned up.  I'll come back to this spot tomorrow.  I filled my 45 gallon bag three times!

People were walking by, and I'm sure they were all wondering why I was bothering.  It'll just get all trashed up again.

Well maybe it will, but maybe it won't.  Maybe some people who live in this neighborhood will like the way it looks when it's clean, and they'll help keep it nice.

I had this area all cleaned up last summer, and I'll have it all cleaned up again.  Tomorrow, I'll continue where I left off.  Then I'll go down Beardsley, over to Morgan Park, clean up Brown to Archwood, continue on Lover's Lane to Arlington, and if the weather stays nice, I'll have it all cleaned up again in about a week.