To wrap up the first week, I thought I’d grab an easy box. No such luck.

Box 7: Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023

CONTENTS: The box contains a variety of plastic items — trays, containers, lids. But the lids in the box don’t fit the containers. And this is the sort of stuff that we try not to accumulate, if at all possible. On those occasions when we can’t avoid the plastic packaging, we try to reuse the packages. (Once, we filled one of those big lettuce tubs with water and set it out in the garden, thinking it might become a birdbath of sorts — and watched, delighted, when a scrub jay actually used it for that purpose.) But the Master Recycler in the house tells me that the items in today’s box are not currently recyclable in your Republic bins. (Some companies such as Terracycle will take them off your hands, for a fee.)

The Master Recycler solves the mystery of where the items in this box came from: A friend in Montana sent them home with us because there’s no curbside recycling where the friend lives and she didn’t want to throw them away. But that means, the Master Recycler deduces, that there’s another box somewhere in the garage that goes with this one. I don’t know where it is.

DISPOSITION: This box, for the time being, goes back into the garage until its partner is found. It’s the first out-and-out defeat in the “365 Boxes” project. I suspect it won’t be the last.