Fifteen years ago when a new family with six-year-old fraternal twins bought the house up the street from ours, directly adjacent the ravine from its original owners, they eventually acquired a small dog to complete their family. Their back yard is unfenced and is contiguous with the ravine. They immediately considered the ravine a kind of dumping ground for their garden detritus. One can only imagine that this was considered by them a kind of bonus of living directly beside the ravine. On the other hand, when the boy of the girl-boy twins once came home from school when he was around 16, he came abreast of an intruder in one of the upstairs bedrooms who had taken advantage of their direct proximity to the ravine to climb through an opened window when no one was at home.

In the past, this neighbour has tossed all her garden cuttings, grass clippings, dead ornamental trees and tree branches into the ravine. It's all organic matter and will decompose along with everything else that falls naturally in the forest. Her succession of two little dogs were painstakingly taught to evacuate in the ravine, a few yards from their backyard, never on their own property. That too represents compostable organic matter.

It's somewhat ironic that living directly beside the ravine, while these people teach their dog to leave their droppings there, some Good Samaritan has gone to the ongoing effort of placing receptacles at all the entrances to the ravine throughout out community of tens of thousands of residents, of whom perhaps a hundred or so ever venture into the ravine, to invite those who do use the trails to pick up their dogs' offal and deposit it in those receptacles for disposal. One receptacle, therefore, has been nailed on to a tree that sits right beside these peoples' property. That profoundly sensitive environmental effort represents one end of the spectrum of respect for nature and one's social environment. Whoever it is who has left those receptacles at all the entrances also has committed to picking up the full bags of excrement and disposing of them, leaving behind clean and empty bags for the process to repeat itself.

The other, of course, is represented by those neighbours, who have gone from merely depositing garden waste into the ravine to leaving other types of durable objects that certainly have no place there, as though the forest represents their very personal dump. About a year ago they wanted to rid their property of a tether pole that their children had long outgrown, so they moved it several metres from their backyard directly beside the ravine entrance, well off their property. In the expectation that it would be taken away by someone? It never was, and remains there, an eyesore to this day.

Yesterday as we entered the ravine it had a companion. Those neighbours had dug up a basketball pole and net that had also stood beside their driveway, feeling that they no longer had use for it, and obviously wishing to rid themselves of it. This too they placed at the entrance to the ravine, with a note scrawled on the large, heavy, unwieldy object reading "Free!"

Really?