Some days it doesn’t seem like we’re coming any closer to a paperless society. We have tried to sign up for many paperless billing options including setting up direct pay for utilities and other routine expenses, but we still receive a lot of paper in the mail. Yesterday I received a notice from a car dealership in South Dakota that my Subaru Forester was overdue for service. I did not report my address change to the car dealership. I also didn’t inform them when I sold the car that we had owned for more than 20 years and had taken to the dealership for service. Somehow they got the address change, but they failed to notice that we no longer have the vehicle. That’s no problem, because the same dealership sends me service notices on a 2014 Crosstrek. We’ve never owned a 2014 Crosstrek.

I guess I understand a company investing in getting their address list correct. They aren’t likely to get any business from the new owner of the home where we used to live. On the other hand, I don’t think many people would drive 1300 miles one way to have the oil changed on their car. You’d think that they might reconsider sending service notices out of state or at least so far out of state. On the other hand, we receive mail at this address that is addressed to people who haven’t lived in this house for years. There is a cruise ship company that sends advertising flyers to my mother at our new address. My mother died ten years ago.

Since I’m complaining, we receive health care through an employer-based medicare PPO. That is a private insurance company that processes claims for medicare as well as provides supplemental insurance for expenses not covered by medicare. That company thinks that we might not be happy if we didn’t receive something from them in the mail every week, even though they encouraged us to set up an electronic account, which we did. They sent us a calendar with stickers so that we could mark the calendar with medical appointments. They even sent spare stickers so we could have more than one annual wellness check up each year and enough doctor’s visits to make anyone question whether or not they were well. The same calendar had stickers to mark birthdays, but not enough to mark the birthdays of our children, grandchildren and siblings. And, as far as we know, all of our friends also have birthdays. We have relatives who have birthdays on the same day, but the stickers are too big to put more than one on the square on the calendar. I guess you can’t have a doctor’s visit and a birthday on the same day. At any rate, the calendar went into the recycling bin. We kept the stickers in a folder that we have for craft projects with our grandchildren. Our three-year-old granddaughter might find a way to use some of the stickers on her artwork.

Fortunately, our curbside recycling pickup takes office paper and newspaper, which means that our bin has quite a bit of paper in it when it is dumped. Since we have read articles stating that a low percentage of what goes into a recycling bin is actually recycled in most cities and towns, we are worried that we are simply adding to the solid waste problem in our community, but we don’t know how to get the mailers to stop sending us mail that we don’t want or need.

Today is Earth Day, an event that has been recognized since we were college students dating each other. We’ve tried, over the years, to recognize the day with some kind of direct action to support the care of the earth. This year it turns out that three of our grandchildren will be at our house today for their home school lessons. They have been home schooling since the schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic and the family decided to continue home schooling through the end of this school year. We help with home school, but as the name implies, most lessons are taught at their home, not ours. However, it works out today for them to come to our home for their lesson time as their mother has other obligations.

We’ve planned a few earth day lessons to go along with the arithmetic, reading, spelling, STEAM and grammar lessons. During a break from the regular lessons, we plan to pick up litter at a nearby city-owned lot that receives quite a bit of litter. We’ve got gloves for the children to wear and bags for sorting recyclable items from garbage. It probably won’t be very interesting for the grandchildren, but the weather is supposed to be lovely and just being able to go outside for an activity will break up their school day.

Picking up litter seems to have been a relatively frequent way of recognizing earth day. the youth at our South Dakota church often participated in the city-wide clean-up and did litter patrol in parks and other public areas. Accompanying the youth and participating in the clean-up was something that we usually did every year.

Still, the struggle with litter feels a bit like the struggle with unnecessary paper. We try to do our part and be responsible, but the amount of litter doesn’t seem to decrease. I can’t imagine throwing litter from a car window, but it appears that people do it every day in our neighborhood.

There are jobs in which we engage that we will never complete. I am willing to being a part of the solution without actually ever solving the problem. I’m willing to pick up litter again and again. Somehow, however, I keep hoping that unlike my mother, I might avoid passing my junk mail on to the next generation. They aren’t going to need service on cars we used to own or calendars with stickers when our time on this earth has ended.