Metro Trash and Homeless Carts

I'm sitting on our balcony on a cloudy, sprinkly Sunday afternoon. Washington has this way of getting so hot an humid one can hardly stand it, and then clouding up for an hour or two and raining just enough to take the edge off. Then the sun comes back out and all the rain that cooled the air evaporates, and we're back to hot, humid, sunny weather - the other day it was 88 degrees with 84 % humidity! At this point in the afternoon, we're in the cool hour. Anyway, sitting next to me (there's a roll of thunder. I bet Frazier headed for the bathtub. I'm not sure what makes that -in his mind- the safest place to be when it thunders, but that's always where he ends up.) is a new contraption that I'm super proud to call my own. It's my very own homeless cart.

I put on my Facebook wall that my life as a city dweller is now complete because I have my very own homeless cart, and I got a few questions as to what a homeless cart really is. I don't actually know the technical name for the homeless cart, I just know the name Chase gave it when we lived in Michigan - "homeless cart." You may have seen them in Bed Bath and Beyond or other housewares-type stores. They are metal and wire 4-wheeled carts that fold up thin for storage, but can be used to move anything that will fit inside them.

Chase dubbed them homeless carts because when we lived in Michigan he worked with a population of low socioeconomic status (ie poor people). Specifically, Chase worked with mentally impaired adults, but for this blog post, the pertinent thing is that many of his clients were homeless at one time or another while he worked with them. Said clients would almost ALWAYS have one of these metal and wire carts into which they would pack all their worldly possessions. Or they would use the carts to collect pop cans and bottles (worth 10 cents a piece in Michigan) from truck stop and car wash trash cans and along the side of the road. Chase has, consequently, associated these carts with homelessness ever since.

It's a significant walk from our parking spot in the parking garage to the door of our apartment. You have to go about 15 yards in the parking garage, then through 2 doorways (one of which you have to use a key to get into), down two long hallways, and THEN you get to our door. So you can imagine why I might have wanted a homeless cart for transporting groceries and such. I hate making multiple trips (so does Chase) so we'd stack up 3, 4, 5, 12, 15 bags on our arms and lug them through the parking garage, through the doors (I'd always forget my key and have to dig it out of my pocket with multiple, heavy bags on my arm), and down the hallways. By the time any fruit I bought actually made it to my kitchen, it was typically bruised enough it needed to be eaten right away, and let's not even mention the amounts of smashed bread and crumbled chips we've eaten!

My cousin Kelsey came out to visit recently, and she noticed the length of the hallways and the frustration of the doors and all. I told her that I'd been asking for a homeless cart for some time, but that my dear husband (who gets me nearly everything my heart desires that we can afford) refused to get me the cart. I didn't think another thing of it until the week after she left, the UPS man knocked on our door. I signed for the very large, thin package wondering what in the world could be in side it. VIOLA! I opened it and my homeless cart appeared!

So for those of you wondering, this is a homeless cart - in picture 1, see how thin it is, and in picture two notice how much one can fit inside it (I left it empty so you could see) and yet it rolls so smoothly.


Although Chase says we're now "metro trash," I'm glad to have my homeless cart. In this economy, one just never knows and at least now I feel prepared for anything!