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I’ll Tell You What’s Rotten
If this was a bruised banana, would you throw the whole thing away? I bet you’d think to add it to a smoothie, or banana bread, or maybe you’d cut out the bad parts and put it on your cereal or yogurt. My dad’s solution was always to cut it in half and fry it. We grow up learning the peel is separate from the fruit. We’re encouraged to find creative uses because we know that the fruit is still nutritious and tasty—despite the shell’s condition—and that wasting food is a travesty, for the environment and for society. Why hasn’t the same education been provided for stewarding furniture? Why aren’t…
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Comfort for the Unsheltered
I met D as he was pushing this cart of furniture down the street. He found them at the DMV. “They were just left there,” he said. D was in transit to his tent in Mosswood park, a large homeless encampment just two blocks away. An abandoned stroller by the car wash caused him to stop. The cart wasn’t working well. We spoke as we unloaded and reloaded the entertainment center and chair from the cart to the stroller. D told me that he’s lost 5 tents to rats at Mosswood park. It’s inundated with rats, he said. Oakland’s unsheltered population recently earned national attention by @nytimes in a powerful…
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Will Wins!
Will drove past this bookshelf on his way home from the laundromat. Instantly recognizing its good condition, he pulled over to take a closer look. His partner was in need of one, he told me, and he liked its look and heft. We shared our amazement of how much freely available, good quality furniture peppered our streets. I told him I saw a skinny black bookshelf earlier that morning just up the hill, if he needed another. Moments later we had it loaded into the bed of his truck, and a used bookshelf was on its way to a new home. Local sharing for the win. #savedfromthelandfill #climatevictory
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Rico’s Chair
The people behind the chairs on the curb can be hard to track down, but I got lucky yesterday. As I stopped to photograph this piece, Rico, as in Puerto Rico, he told me, asked if I was looking for a chair. He stopped sweeping the sidewalk and came to show me how it popped out into a twin bed. He said he was letting this one go because he had too many chairs. I complimented the green and yellow art on the inside arm. “It’s Russian,” he said, eyes twinkling. Though he seemed to be offering the chair to anyone who stopped to look, he said a woman who…
