Hillbillies of Daisytown of 2007

We were recently honored by the township supervisors by being named the "Hillbillies of Daisytown" for 2007. I have been grooming the lawn all summer. I seeded it early in the spring and watered it for a couple of months until it towered above all the other lawns despite draught conditions in mid-summer. We also placed several objects around the yard: a bucket laying on its side, a cat litter box filled with rain water, our old kitchen sink leaning against a stone wall. We disregarded the township "burn days" of Wednesday and Saturday, and instead burned trash on Sunday morning. And of course, having chickens roaming around and crowing helped out as well.

But I think the crowning achievement was the upright piano on our porch. Some people think couch or recliner, but we decided to go bigger. I think that got a lot of attention and put us over the top.

But all good things must come to an end, and so I finally cut the grass. And I decided to get rid of the piano. First, I asked one of the garbage men when they came to pick up the trash. The guy told me if I could get it down to the road, he had a cable that he could attach to the piano and hoist it up into the garbage truck, which was a regular looking garbage truck. He said that he wouldn't tell the company anything about it if I didn't. I really wanted to see that, but I didn't know how I could get it all the way down the steps by myself. The only way would be to just shove it and hope it didn't crack the concrete of the steps or the sidewalk.

I decided on plan B. Haul it to the dump myself. So, as all trips to the dump begin, I called my uncle to borrow his truck, drove into my yard, and backed up to the porch.

Pushing the piano to the edge of the porch wasn't too difficult once I got its wheels pointing the right direction. I was a little bit worried about the first push off the porch until I realized that the piano would immediately grind to a halt as its wood base hit the edge of the porch. The wheels would not touch the steps at all. Once the first wheel was off the porch, I had to shove it from behind--wood on wood--until enough of the weight was hanging off the porch for the piano to tip down to the tailgate. Then I put my homemade dolly under the front edge and pushed.

This was the moment when I realized that this could be my greatest victory or my most humiliating defeat. If the piano ended up in the yard, the good news would be a virtual lock on the 2008 Hillbillies of Daisytown. The bad news would be that the piano would be virtually impossible to remove once it was down there. Only one way to find out...I pried the wheels up out of the depression at the back of the tailgate and shoved.

The piano went off balance and started to fall backwards. I tried to control its fall a little bit without ending up back in physical therapy. As luck would have it, the truck bed was high enough to prevent it from falling into the yard, but now it was impossible for me to get it back into an upright position. So instead I rotated it until it was on its back sideways in the truck bed.

The truck appears to be leaning to the right, but the angle of the photo exaggerates how much it was actually leaning. The piano actually only stuck out about a foot from the side and hardly shifted at all on the way to the dump where a kindly sanitation worker helped me shove it onto Mount Trashmore. The woman at the check out shack told me they never do that. Having been weighed when I entered and when I left, I found out that I had single-handedly moved a piano weighing 600 pounds. Perhaps my greatest accomplishment to date.