The Earth Is Not a Trash Can

Our previous mayor of Nashville promoted neighborhood sidewalks, which is a great idea. I use sidewalks daily. Newsom Station Road needs sidewalks between the neighborhoods. It’s a dangerous road to walk. I don’t even ride my bicycle on Newsom Station any more because of the speeders. Sometimes, I don’t feel safe making a left hand turn into my neighborhood because of the cars racing down the hill.

Yesterday, I left my neighborhood to walk to the Bellevue Announcements sign about a mile away to take the photo for the blog. Once I exited the neighborhood, I walked along the side of Newsom Station Road for less than a quarter mile until I reached another sidewalk.

When I reached the sidewalk at the top of the hill on Newsom Station, I discovered not only litter, but an overgrown sidewalk, which is not an inviting place to walk. In places, I hurdled the weeds growing in the middle of the sidewalk.

When this sidewalk was built during the mayoral sidewalk boom, we were puzzled because it’s a sidewalk that begins and ends nowhere. Plus there are sidewalks leading nowhere on both sides of the road, while elsewhere in the neighborhood, the sidewalks are on one side on the road only.

I’m going to contact Metro Public Works about the weeds and litter on the sidewalks. I had planned to pick up some trash on my return trip, but I’m afraid of ticks, which lurk in grass. I didn’t want to bring home someone’s beer cans and water bottles, then discover a tick crawling in the private areas of my body.

If I let my yard grow wild as this sidewalk, my neighbors would complain and I would be fined.