Gloriously foul and endlessly fascinating, snow trash happens when the deep snow melts and reveals the urban detritus of weeks. It is a special seasonal process to be enjoyed only a few times a year. Because I happen to be a professional studier of the material remnants of human activity, I can’t look away from a nice nasty city snow bank. I like them to be really full of good stuff and I stop for particularly rich ones to be sure I’m seeing everything. This isn’t the WideEyedSpouse’s favorite activity, but the dogs sure don’t mind.

Dog dookies are ubiquitous in the melting snow banks. Big, small, dark, light. You can really see the variety of diets fed to the neighborhood canines. Here in Buffalo chicken bones also are typical in the melting snow mounds. Perplexing. Yes, Buffalo Chicken wings, but does everyone eat them all the time? They must fly from car windows like confetti.

I see newspapers, catalogs, dryer sheets, and Kleenex that appear used but may just be wet from the melt. I haven’t developed a way to determine used versus wet yet but I do tend to think crumpled means used. They come in all colors: white, pink, green, yellow. I have suspicions that the yellows started as white and they are in fact used.

A shoe appears every now and again and it baffles me every time. Where does that single shoe come from? Who walked home with one shoe? If you noted that your shoe had come loose from your foot, in the winter, would you not backtrack? Go on a little hunt for your missing shoe? What I should do is determine if the single shoe is statistically significantly correlated with the presence of a spray of brightly colored vomit. Which, by the way, can be observed on the white snow with alarming frequency. Here my broader hypothesis is that inebriated people throw up hard enough to toss a shoe, and then they don’t notice their shoe is gone. Although, there are no bars in the immediate vicinity, so they must be home drinkers. Alternatively, the vomit could innocently result from too many chicken wings or a terrible Kleenex supported flu that hits while walking the family dog (which parsimoniously explains the vomit, the Kleenex litter, the uncleaned up dookies, AND maybe even the shoe. Now that’s hypothetical model building friends.). I might be looking for too many causal links. I can’t help myself, that’s what I do.

Yesterday the dogs and I saw something entirely new. A unique specimen. A kidzbop 3 CD had sliced into a snow bank and it gleamed in the morning sun. A prize. Hamish sniffed it pretty good and Tibbit wee’d near it. From its position in the snow bank, about 1.4 meters in from the street, I could posit that kidzbop 3 had been flung from a moving car. The presence of the kidzbop cd in the snowbank distracted me all day and I developed a series of hypotheses explaining why the cd had been flung:

H1: “What? No baby I don’t have any kids.” Fling.

H2. I went home and found kidzbop 3 online. Gave it a listen. Who wouldn’t?. And so, Hypothesis 2: Track 1: remake of Soak up the Sun. Track 2: remake of Hey Baby Hey Baby Hey sung by tunelessly chanting children. Track 3: (does it even matter?)…Fling.

H3: “Oh look, a cd came in my used car…” Fling.

H4: “Oh God, the baby just puked in the car! All over everything!” Fling.

H5: “Mamamamamama play kidzbop. Play kidzbop. Play it. Play it. Plaaaaaayyyyy iiitttt.” Fling.

I went back later to get kidzbop 3. It was gone. Gone.