Low Impact Week, Day Three

Yesterday living a low impact life seemed easy. That, I now realize, was because I didn’t leave home. Today, day three, I went to town to do several necessary errands. Banking was no problem. Mailing a package was no problem. The difficulties arose as soon as I reached the grocery store and realized that I had forgotten to put the damn cloth shopping bags in the car.

In Checker’s produce department I quickly found exactly what I was looking for – Jonathon apples from Waverly, Missouri. OK, Waverly isn’t exactly local, but these apples traveled less than 100 miles to get here. That’s good enough for a low impact woman. Unfortunately all the Jonathon apples came in big plastic bags.

Riding high on my success I thoughtlessly put a hand of 19-cents-a-pound bananas in my cart.

Next I looked for local meat, and sure enough, there was bratwurst produced in Bonner Springs, Kansas, just a short hop down the road. 

About this time I realized that no matter how I rationalize, bananas are not local, regional, or even national. I detoured back to the produce department to get rid of the bananas, the wind going out of my sails.

More sensitized now to the hazards of grocery shopping, as I passed through the aisles I realized that very, very little merchandise came from anywhere near where I live. And that, I suppose, is the purpose of holding a No Impact Week – to make us aware of the choices we are offered and the choices we make. How much petroleum was burned in the process of getting all these products to the store?

I can’t remember a time when I checked out at a grocery store with so little in my cart.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Low Impact Week

My daughter Carol has organized a No Impact Week in South Portland, Maine, where she lives with her husband and children. Carol claims that it’s my fault she gets involved in projects such as this because I stressed caring for the environment when she was a child. I don’t remember that specifically, although I do remember taking her and her siblings for outings in the country most weekends. We tramped through woods, played in creeks, and picked wild raspberries.

At any rate, her e-mail soliciting people to join her to “spend a week limiting consumption of fossil fuels, buying nothing new (except food) reducing trash/water usage and eating locally,” must have been persuasive because she signed up 38 participants, including me. I can’t do no impact, but I can do low impact.

Our low impact week started yesterday, but I can’t claim to have changed my normal behavior very much yet. It’s easier for me to eat locally because I only have to walk to my garden, visit the chicken house, open my freezer, or go to the basement to find homegrown food. We eat potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, tomatoes, turnips, beets, greens, peppers, and more. We eat homemade bread and biscuits made of wheat milled in Kansas. Of course we eat eggs.

We use cloth napkins. All kitchen waste goes to the dog, the chickens, or the compost heap. We already recycle paper, glass, plastic, and metal. I save up bits of broken metal to take to Gunther’s, a scrap metal enterprise not far from home.

The hard part of low impact for me is transportation. We live ten miles from the nearest town and I’m way to old and decrepit to ride a bike there and back to do errands. All I can do is carefully limit my trips.

Neither can I hang laundry outside or even inside to dry for that matter. Although I didn’t have a clothes dryer for many years, arthritis has put an end to my carrying baskets of wet clothes and pinning them to a clothesline.

Still, I’ve found some things I can do to reduce our waste of resources.

Instead of rinsing each dish under a stream of water before placing it in the dishwasher, I’m using one small pan of water to rinse all the dishes and utensils.

I’ve cut a torn pillowcase and a frayed t-shirt into paper-towel-size pieces. These are for the woman who cleans our house to use. Every time she comes to clean she uses an entire roll of paper towels, which seems profligate. I sure hope she will go along with my plan to use the rags and wash them along with other laundry.

I plan to make my own laundry soap. Pam, who helps me with various tasks (including killing egg-eating snakes), gave me a gallon jug of some she made for pennies. It works quite well, maybe better than the detergent I normally buy in big cardboard boxes with a brand new plastic scoop in each box. Now I will buy three ingredients that come in little containers and make a lot of cleanser, which will be poured into the same gallon jug each time I mix it.

I’ve talked Dennis into turning off his electronic equipment when he isn’t using it, which he did for the first time last night. That was an easy sell, for he was dismayed by the amount of our last electricity bill.

I’ve resolved to always keep cloth shopping bags in my car and to remember to take them with me when I enter a store.

Finally, I’m going to go back to homemade crackers. I used to make them – both wheat and rye – until my wrists hurt too much to roll the dough thinly. Now that I have strong, fused wrists there’s no reason to keep buying crackers that come in plastic bags inside cardboard boxes and sometimes sit in plastic trays.

These changes may not add up to much, but I believe that every little bit counts. 

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

A Day of Odd Occurrences

Here in Paradise there’s no telling what Sunday afternoon will bring. This one has been a bit more odd than usual.

First of all, when I cracked my breakfast egg into the skillet it had two big yellow yolks. I hadn't seen a double yolk for years. Then Dennis came back from the chicken house with a couple of strange eggs. The elongated one is very soft at one end and has a little hole at its tip. The tiny one is a perfect miniature, but I’m sure if it were cracked open it wouldn’t have a yolk.

Then, when I went to the garden to pick some parsley, I noticed that the kale, which was stripped of its leaves by cabbage worms, is making a comeback. I’m glad we didn’t pull the skeletons up. Right after taking this photo I gave it a drink of water to encourage more growth.

Jack and Jeff came for a visit this afternoon, prompting another odd occurrence, a ceremony of pinning medals on each other, accompanied by much saluting and shoulder slapping. It was a male bonding thing, I suppose.

Finally, at day’s end, Dennis has come bearing a giant puffball mushroom he came across while mowing. He is still wearing his medal.

That’s enough oddities for one day. I made a plate of tomatoes with basil and olive oil for a touch of normalcy.

I hope you had an interesting Sunday, too.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

October's Bounty

This morning, looking at our robust pepper plants bursting with bloom and loaded with fruit, I felt sorry for them. Peppers are subtropical plants. Peppers grow to be trees in their native habitat, but here a frost kills them dead. They don’t know that our average first frost date is just around the corner. Boy, are they going to be surprised.

Tomatoes, also, will go bye-bye, but they are in decline and would soon die anyway. Their life span is almost over. They probably won’t much care when the frost comes, sort of like old people who are a little tired of living.

Still there are plenty of Roma tomatoes to harvest. Dennis picked some today, and I harvested a few turnips, beets and peppers.

I grow turnips for their greens, not their roots. Turnip greens are bursting with calcium and a host of other nutrients. I like them for their taste. Supper tonight includes turnip and beet greens braised in olive oil and garlic.

The runty beets I gave to the chickens along with all the greens trimmings, but I couldn’t give them the turnips. Studying them, I remembered that I’ve been encountering the words “pickled turnips” lately. Cooked turnips have never appealed to me much, but pickles might be a different story. After consulting Internet recipes I opted for an oriental version that includes kombu, rice wine vinegar, sugar, and kosher salt.

This is a test. It is only a test. October’s bounty allows some gambling.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

My People

Twenty years ago or more I started growing hard-shelled gourds. In Santa Fe I had seen wonderful decorative pots made of gourds. I wanted to make gourd pots, too. The first couple of years I didn’t plant very many seeds and harvested only a few gourds. Then one year I decided to go all out. I bought seeds of many different-shaped gourds and devoted a quarter of our half-acre garden to them. The harvest was amazing – more than 500 gourds, a lifetime supply.

I created many pots from gourds and sold many of them, but I still keep certain favorites, such as this little one.

Somewhere along the line some of the gourds began to look like human heads to me. I cut some in half and started making masks. They were inspired at first by people I saw but very soon the masks began to become themselves. That’s what happened when I made Naif, pictured below. I thought I was making a Cossack, but the gourd chose to express itself as an innocent young girl so I cooperated.

The same thing happened when I tried to make a swami. He turned into a wrapped-up Muslim woman. I’ve never liked her very well, but, hey, who am I to judge?

A hussy I encountered inspired this one.

And she made me think of the satyr. I hang them side by side.

I made a couple of masks from other materials, such as a piece of bark that reminded me of the bi-polar condition.

An ancient tricycle seat rescued from a river bank became a local character I think of as The Red-Haired Guy. He had a short leg and walked with difficulty in his built-up shoe. His dyed red hair and his loneliness broke my heart.

When the middle East heated up I made the Fanatic. I have never figured out whether he is a religious leader or a terrorist.

Most recently I’ve been interested in Native American mythology, which inspired Corn Maiden and Grandmother Spider.

For a couple of years I sold some masks. Wal-Mart Girl, Gamblin’ Man, Saw A Vampire, Hillary, and Wood Nymph live with people around Lawrence, but Bill Gates hangs in a corporate boardroom in Hamburg, Germany. I miss them and I’m sorry I put them up for adoption. I’ll never sell another one. The masks are my people.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

October Walkabout

I’ve been feeling bum most of the day, but a glance out my bedroom window and I knew it was time for a walkabout, aching bones be damned. The alluring slant of sunlight through the woods pulled me right out the back door with my camera in hand.

I passed the duke-it-out perennial bed, where vinca, garlic chives, quaking grass, and native buckbrush are doing their best to annihilate each other. It’s hard to say who is winning, although the garlic chives and quaking grass have claimed a lot of vinca territory.

At the west end of our yard I visited the memorial and noted that the old locust stump is still holding together.

Heading back toward our house I stopped to admire a tree stump that has been slowly rotting away during the 38 years we have lived here. The detritus, which I call stump rot, will soon be decayed enough to harvest. After sifting out the chunks I will use it as seed-starting medium.

I love the way the base of that old tree embraced and lifted a stone as it grew.

Every walkabout includes a tour of our vegetable garden. Today I was pleased to see that the Egyptian onions I started last spring are reproducing as expected. Instead of blooming, these onions produce a cluster of babies atop a tall stalk. When the stalk dries it falls over and the bulblets take root. That’s why they are called “walking onions.” They also multiply by dividing – where I planted one, there now are two. These onions are perennial and provide fresh green onions early each spring.

The walkabout ended with a bit of foraging, the gathering of dandelion greens. I’m using a new harvest method. Instead of using a dandelion digger to take the whole plant, I used scissors to cut only the part of each leaf that I will cook. Preparation will be much easier and faster this way. Now that I’ve discovered how delicious their leaves are I don’t want to eradiate even one dandelion. Here's my harvest, ready to chop and saute. The greens will supplement the left-over pot roast for supper tonight.

If you’re feeling bum, I strongly recommend a walkabout. A little bending and stretching doesn’t hurt either.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Sunday Dinner

In Bates City, Missouri, where I lived as a child, Sunday dinner was the most important and elaborate meal of the week. Sunday dinner occurred about 1:00 in the afternoon.

On Saturday, after five days of teaching history and geography at Odessa high school. Mother not only cleaned the entire house and did the week’s laundry, but also made a Jello salad, sometimes with fruit and sometimes with grated carrots and pineapple, and baked a pie or made an angel food cake.

On Sunday morning she rose early to peel potatoes, open a jar of home-canned green beans, and start a beef roast cooking before she got gussied up and went to teach a Sunday school class and attend church services.

Occasionally she was also responsible for preparing the communion wafers and “wine” for the church service. The communion wafers were home-made pie crust cut into tiny pieces before baking and the wine a bottle of Welch’s grape juice poured into the tiny communion glasses that sat in trays especially designed to hold them.

After we returned from church, Mother covered the dining room table with a perfectly-ironed damask tablecloth and napkins and set the table with inherited Haviland china and sterling sliver tableware, along with her beloved Fostoria teardrop crystal goblets. She boiled the green beans and potatoes. She removed the beef roast from the oven and replaced it with homemade rolls to warm before dinnertime. She also made an iceberg lettuce salad and opened a jar of home-canned jelly or preserves, putting both into teardrop serving bowls.

After dinner she hand-washed all the crystal, china, silverware, and pots and pans, and put them away after I dried them. Dish-drying was my only contribution.

I don’t know how Mother summoned the energy to do all this, and I don’t really understand why she was motivated to do it. Even so, I appreciate the memories and today, Sunday, I decided to commemorate her Herculean effort by making a pot roast with mashed potatoes. This was a pale comparison to the Sunday dinners Mother served, but every bite was delicious.

Thank you, Mother, for these wonderful memories. I’m not the woman you were, but I appreciate all you did to make Sunday dinner a special occasion.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer