5 Bags Full

The volunteer effort to sweep the transit center resulted in five bags full of cigarette butts.  It took 10 people an hour and thirty minutes to collect such a quantity of butts. 

A passenger friend, a real God-send, worked as two men.  We all got a laugh out of the tool I fashioned to scrape the seams between the concrete slabs.  It was a rake handle with a screw protruding from the end and was affectionately named  “the butt cracker."

We left feeling tired but accomplished. We departed wondering how smoking in a public space can still be allowed?