When a cup of tea is unwelcomed

To the Editor: My wife is a member of the Warwick Valley Gardeners, a group who sees to it the Village Green area is planted with flowers and shrubs each year; weeded; fertilized; plants dead-headed, etc. For free. I went with her this a.m. to help with dragging hoses out for their morning project and spoke with a couple of men from the Village DPW. They were picking up trash of all kinds left apparently by residents who fail to live by the old thing about “if you brought it here, take it with you.” Then the funniest (not really funny) part was when one of the guys said “Watch this,” and walked over to the sidewalk to pick up a used tea bag, dumped by the first meter on the north side of Railroad Avenue at Main Street. Appears someone parks there early every morning — gets a container of tea, I assume from the corner shop — and unceremoniously dumps the used tea bag at the same spot on the sidewalk and drives off, leaving it for our Village crew to pick up. Isn’t that wonderful? Here we have Village residents donating their time and efforts to make the area look special and some zero deliberately dumps trash on the sidewalk, time after time. Oh, and how about the empty beer bottles over by the benches? And all the while there are trash collection barrels in the area to take care of this. It does make you wonder what priorities people who would do this, might have. Or values. Or lack thereof. Strange, isn’t it? It would take such a minimal effort by everyone to practically eliminate the littering that takes place in the Village. And the Town as well, for that matter. A minimal effort with really satisfying results for everyone. Ken Durland Warwick