It's a lesson parents try to teach their children: Don't take something that isn't yours.

Especially if it's trash.

But for one week each spring, that rule is set aside in Cape Girardeau. All this week, solid waste crews are picking up an abundance of trash and refuse at the street curb.

Everything from old refrigerators and ovens to couches and bundles of sticks are set at the curb, even at some of the city's finest homes.

While most of the trash is really just junk, some of it is buried treasure waiting to be discovered.

Ask any scavenger. They are the folks who drive around town late at night, slowing down at every driveway so they can glance at the trash heaps.

Apparently, some people have really good taste in junk, and I must be one of them.

I put my bulk trash at the curb Sunday afternoon so I wouldn't be hauling an old table and screen door to the curb at midnight after I got off work.

While I went back to the basement to haul out even more stuff, a man in a beat up, pickup truck stopped to take a wooden pedestal table. (I'd saved the table from a trash bin a year ago, thinking I'd fix it up. It never happened, so I set it out for trash.) After he saw me dragging a heavy wooden door to the curb, he helped me carry the other closet doors to his truck so he could take them, too.

Later that afternoon, I watched from my living room window as a woman, who was driving a Cadillac, stopped for a ratty lampshade and a broken halogen lamp.

Even the best of us like to find a bargain.

I had to keep myself from stopping for two wooden planters that just needed a new coat of paint. They would have looked great on my front porch, too.

Coming back from work Sunday night, I saw people driving up and down the streets, looking through other people's trash. I couldn't help but think that you could furnish entire homes from the things people were throwing away.

When you look at what we are wasting, it's almost a shame. There are people in the world with so much less, and all over our city people are throwing away their excess.

I was telling a friend from Little Rock, Ark., about cleaning out my basement in preparation for the bulk trash pickup. I explained to her that people would be rummaging through my things as quickly as I got them to the curb.

She couldn't believe it. First of all, she was dumbfounded that someone would even attempt to dig through the trash outside your home, but then to learn that the practice was almost considered tradition really astonished her.

And people here don't think a thing about it. It's just a tradition during the spring cleanup week.

After all, digging through other people's trash is sort of like recycling. You just take the good stuff and reuse it, reducing the trash taken to the landfill.

It just proves that there's a bargain-hunter in all of us.

~Laura Johnston is a copy editor for the Southeast Missourian.