Sunshine and Light

Strange, Green World

It’s funny to me to watch the current rounds of environmental excitement. Funny not because there isn’t a legitimate concern we should have for the environment, but because a lot of this is a throw back to the way my parents and grandparents have lived for decades.

Eat Local? Ha. I grew up in the Midwest, EVERYONE either had a garden or had squash and tomatoes pawned off on them by gardeners all summer. Dad is a champ gardener. One year we weighed the tomatoes, and his garden kicked out 440lbs of tomatoes. For a family of four. That doesn't count all of the other things he grew (lettuce, spinach, peas, cucumbers, beans, okra, broccoli, cherries, plums, rhubarb, herbs...), which were probably highly helped by his composting of kitchen scraps. (Important Note: Do not compost meat/bones. My aunt did this and found herself with lots of friendly neighborhood rats).

Forget Recycle, Mom and grandma topped the Reduce/Reuse list. Mom canned tomatoes in all forms in July in St Louis, with a little help from her sweaty children. And she was a piker, my grandparents had a peach tree, and there were canned peaches and peach preserves year round in addition to the items from the garden. I remember my grandmother washing out plastic bread wrappers for food storage. And because they canned, there were plenty less aluminum/tin cans in the trash and a lot more glass jars in the dish washing.

Oh and don’t think my brother and I escaped the reduce/reuse thing either. I had 33 cousins, a good portion of whom were older than I was. Some were 20 years older. And I got the hand me downs. Not every kid was blessed with plaid bell-bottoms in the 80s, but me? I was stylin’. Now I would just be called Vintage.

In the late 70s/early 80s, we started recycling aluminum. In part that was because it was $.29/lb. The summer my Dad got laid off of work, we went down to the drive-in theater that was a few blocks away and in the morning went through and snagged aluminum cans. Fortunately our days as aluminum can trash people were short lived as he was only out of a job for a month. We didn’t stop recycling our own aluminum cans, and to this day my parents assiduously clean out aluminum cans, crush them, and haul them off to the recycling center.

Until the late 80s, my dad would walk 2 miles each morning and evening to catch the van pool to work. At one point we had 3 people working and one car. We walked a lot in an area that wasn’t precisely rife with sidewalks.

I’m not suggesting I’m some sort of goddess of environmentalism. Quite the opposite. The minute I got a few bucks to rub together, I was as decadently tossing aluminum cans and driving 3 blocks to the grocery as the next person. (I’m trying to clean up my act again, I swear!) But I’m amused to see that all of these things aren’t just for the lower middle class any more. I knew where I was in the pecking order as a kid, so it’s funny to me to see the shee-shee people lining up to live that kind of life. We did it because we couldn’t afford not to. Now they’re doing it because it’s cool. Life is strange and wonderful.

posted by MyHusbandRules @ 2:48 PM