When forest fires made our summer air toxic in Portland, Ore., I drove to a hardware store far across town to gather materials to make a homemade air purifier. My partner, Nick, lugged a heavy AC unit up from the basement which we hoped would cool and clean the air coming into our 90-degree home.
After a day, I realized that the AC was filling the children’s rooms with noxious air. When I asked my partner to help me alter the AC unit, he said there was nothing we could do, and that “a lot of people have things worse than we do.” I totally lost my mind, yelling, “I don’t care about other people!”
For work, I help women who are at risk of human trafficking. Caring about other people is central to my life. But on that day, fear briefly overpowered empathy. I was enraged because I felt powerless to keep my children safe. — Rachel Kinley
‘Did You Just Put Something in My Trash?’
My partner and I were on our normal dog walk on a beautiful summer afternoon. On the way out of the woods, we dropped our dog waste bag in a neighbor’s trash can that sits at the mouth of a wooded trail. We’re always grateful that this neighbor, whose house is up a long driveway (it’s a semirural area), leaves his can there all the time. You’re supposed to wheel it back to your house in between weekly pickups, but this one is always there and saves us and many others from having to carry our bags all the way home.
Anyway, we dropped it in the can and headed off, but this time we turned at the sound of hard-hitting footsteps on the gravel to see a middle-aged man striding purposefully toward us. “Hey, did you just put something in my trash?” he said. “What are your names?” Being good neighbors, we cheerfully responded. He then proceeded to berate us with accusations of ruining his life with our dog waste. How could we be so selfish! We looked so nice; how could we even for one moment think this was OK?
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’d be happy to take it out.” But when I opened the can to do so, I laughed because the entire bottom third of the can was filled with dozens of colorful bags, all tied with their tidy knots, a confetti of dog waste.
