Strange, big,
lumbering machines that roll slowly
and feature
huge circular brushes. The ones I used
to see in
my childhood were
white affairs about
twice
as high as a car, so that you couldn't see the driver.
The driver sat on the right,
as if he were an Englishman,
the reason being
he could see the side of the road
better. The vehicle would
fire jets of water into the
gutter and spin its
wild whirly brushes, leaving the
street much cleaner than before.
Because of my fascination with science fiction, it
always seemed to me that the street cleaners would
be the perfect vehicle for defending the earth from
alien invaders, provided of course that the water
jets could be turned up to spray those extraterrestrials
with ammonia or some other household chemical that would
cause their bodies to melt.