The Barrington Middle School basketball courts are not the only places in town plagued with trash these days.

A quick tour of Barrington’s roads and parks reveals way too much litter — fast food boxes, bags and cups clinging to bushes and branches; empty beer cans and soda bottles scattered along sidewalks and roadsides; and way too many plastic bags filled with dog feces plopped all over the place.

Are we really this messy?

Each spring the town emerges from winter, and as the snow melts it reveals our dirty little… uh, litter secret.

Chances are pretty good that some of the trash was tossed out the window of a passing car, maybe one from another community. But it’s pretty likely that a fair amount of the garbage is home-grown, left behind by people who live a block or two away from the spot where it now resides.

Sometimes the wind is to blame — we’re thinking of those blustery days when residents’ trash and recycling bins are battered by wind gusts that scatter items across streets and yards. But on many occasions, the litter is intentional: On more than a few occasions we’ve spotted an empty bag from a Route 6 restaurant left in the parking lot a Chianese Park, or empty beer bottles piled in the corner of the dirt parking lot at Haines. Upland Way seems to suffer at the hands of litterbugs often, as does the wooded area owned by St. Andrew’s School along Middle Highway.

We can do better than this.

Let’s hope that as winter’s chill departs and spring’s thaw sets in we can focus some of our energy to picking up after ourselves. A more beautiful Barrington is good for all of us.