A happy coincidence of our Iowa trip was that it coincided with the annual cleanup day in my mom's town, which is fondly referred to by our family as Klem Kadiddlehopper Day. It is the one day of the year when people who live in the town can put anything except toxic chemicals out on the curb and the city will come haul it away. Anything and everything does appear on the curb, and before the city garbage trucks get there, the loot gets picked over by dozens of people who make good on that old saying that one person's trash is another person's treasure. And it is fascinating to see both what your neighbors throw out and what the people who drive around in old pickup trucks--the Klem Kadiddlehoppers--find worthy of picking up. This year we were Klem Kadiddlehoppers ourselves and picked up some Tonka dump trucks out of a neighbor's pile on the curb for AJ to play with at Grandma's house when we visit. There seemed to be more people driving around picking things up this year, which may be a sign of the economy. I also noticed more minivans and station wagons than in past years when it was mainly old pickup trucks. We saw a ping-pong table, a washer-dryer set and several armchairs go by. I also noticed that there were a lot of scrappers who would stop to strip any available metal from the items left on the curb. One guy very efficiently dismantled a neighbor's office chair to get the metal legs off the bottom. He was obviously an expert scrapper.
As a side note on the Klem Kadiddlehopper Day title, this was just the phrase that my mom has used for years to describe this day. In my mind, the label Klem Kadiddlehopper Day conjured up a mental picture of a handy guy driving an old jalopy. As I went to draft this post, I started to wonder where that terminology came from and Googled it. Turns out that Klem Kadiddlehopper was a "very funny but slow-witted" character who was part of the comedian Red Skeleton's repetoire. Red Skeleton was from my Minnesota grandfather's era, so it makes sense that this phrase made its way into our family's language. I don't mean to use it offensively at all and in my mind the character is not slow-witted.
In the pictures above, AJ is helping my mom select items out of her garage to take to the curb, including an old patio umbrella.
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