What does Spring time in your town feel like, or mean to you?
In Ashcroft it means the osprey are back and the river is picking up in speed as the mountain runoffs race down the creekbeds to join it.
It means the Communities in Bloom plant swap and the bright flower containers throughout the downtown.
People don their shorts and t-shirts as soon as the thermometer hits 16C (60F), and everyone can’t wait to get going. On anything.
In Cache Creek, it means I can look out of my front window and not see any snow on the hills to the west. It means happy birdsong in my backyard (as opposed to the unhappy winter complaints) as they check out the housing in the cedars and root around under the old grass clippings and leaf piles for bugs.
It means the irritating sound of dirtbikes on the hills, but we haven’t heard those yet, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope that it was just a fad of days gone by.
It means campers on the highway and lots of tourists in town.
It means the car crazy days of summer and Graffiti Days in June.
Unfortunately, Spring also means garbage. Litter.
It gets uncovered by the melting ice and snow. It gets blown about by the extreme Spring winds and left in the ditches, bushes and along the banks of the river and creek.
It gets thrown from passing cars, tossed by people sitting outside having their lunches, left behind by people too lazy to hold on to it until they come to the next garbage can.
Litter doesn’t grown on trees; it’s put there by people.
The Cache Creek Beautification Society held one of its annual community clean ups last week, and while the downtown looked much tidier than normal, that’s probably mostly due to the Public Works Dept. keeping it clean, rather than the absence of litterbugs.
C’mon, folks, put litter where it belongs, not on the street.
Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal