Litter SUPER bugs

A few years ago, just a few blocks from my house in North Pole, and right in the median of the Richardson Highway, were the remains of a black couch. It was an ugly corpse, a half dozen jumbled pieces of wood, fabric, and stuffing. It took a few days for me to even figure out what it was.
Not long before there was a freezer reclining on its side along the road between Fairbanks and North Pole, and for months a lone couch cushion lingered near a clump of bushes. It wasn't unusual to see broken bits of what used to be bookcases or dresser drawers or beds. Bags of garbage were so common they didn't warrant a second glance.
This year there isn't as much junk along the road and that gives me a bit of hope for my fellow citizens. Maybe the litterbuggers have moved to Florida or California.
The strange thing about these oversized pieces of junk is that they never seem to get picked up. They stay there, week after week, month after month, until May comes and the fleets of good citizens hit the highways and byways and pick up other people's trash.
It’s like people don’t notice their belongings are missing.
Let’s say a guy is moving and borrowed his buddy’s pickup truck for the big event. He piles it high and drives off down the highway. When he gets to his new place and unloads, wouldn’t you think he’d realize the couch was gone? Like when he wants to take a break and catch an rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond and goes into the living room to sit down and there’s nothing but the coffee table to park his behind on?
How about the person who has a couch with only two cushions? Instead of going back and retrieving the third one from the side of the road does she just stuff an old pillow into the vacant area?
Somewhere in Fairbanks there are people who are using milk crates to hold their underwear because the dressers they once owned jumped out of trucks or off trailers and came to crashing deaths. There are people with only three chairs around their dinette table.
It’s understandable that a person can take a six-month collection of stinking garbage bags to the landfill and, on the journey, not notice that one slipped off the pile. It’s not understandable that someone can lose a couch, or a chair, or a dresser and not realize it. Especially when the person undoubtedly frequently drives by the remains.
“Enid, doesn’t that look a bit like our old dresser?”
“Come to think of it, Earl, it does. I wondered what happened to that thing. It just sort of disappeared during the move.”
If these people have friends wouldn’t you think the friends would notice that the black couch in the ditch looks familiar, that the living room looks a bit empty, and put two and two together?
“So, Jim, what happened to that pink fuzzy sofa you and Gloria used to have?”
“Got to the first stoplight when we moved and looked back and it was gone. Someone musta stole it off the truck.”
“There’s one all smashed in the ditch a mile or so down the highway looks just like it.”
“That so? Wow! What you ‘spose the odds of that are—that there’d be two of them fuzzy pink sofas in Fairbanks?”
Most people, if they lost so much as a cardboard box along the road, would stop, turn around and go back and retrieve it. It’s the honorable, good-citizen thing to do. Just like it’s a good thing to automatically bend over and pick up stray garbage we encounter as we venture through life.
Sometimes you've just got to wonder about some people.