$1.45 a Gallon - Hold Me Back!

No...really...hold me back.

Take my car keys away. Help me remember how committed I was to driving slower, consolidating trips, and working from home when gas was $4.00 a gallon. And while you're at it, don't let me buy ice cream.

I feel a little like a child who insists on playing with a sharp knife. I cut my finger, just a little; it hurt and it bled and it scared me. But then the bleeding stopped and I didn't need stitches and it healed and now the knife is looking all shiny and pretty again. If I ignore the painful but relatively gentle warning and play with the knife again, will I cut my finger off next time, or fall on the blade and impale myself on my own stubborn refusal to behave?

When gas went to $4.00 a gallon, I heard the warning and put the shiny toy down. We drove so much less and so much slower. I didn't run to the store every time I had a creative urge to cook something and needed just one more ingredient. My employer was gracious enough to let me start working from home part of the time, cutting another 45 mile round trip out of every day. Not only did we save money, but I could almost feel the trees on our hilltop property breathing easier, saying, "Thanks!"

Ah, but as soon as gas went down again, I saw the shiny and started reaching for it. Filling my tank for $30 instead of $80 made me feel all healed up. With giddy, guilty glee, I pointed my full to the brim mechanical chariot toward unnecessary destinations at unduly high speeds because it only cost me $30 and it was shiny and pretty and fun.

I'm getting the same warnings about my hard-earned weight loss. I've put back just a few pounds of it and I can feel the effects. Not good. Not good at all. I lost all that weight and got to feeling good and in control and smart enough to know I could splurge a little now and then...and then again...and now...and now and again. Now I'm struggling to get back into a healthy eating pattern again before I have to go wrestle my friends for all the too-big clothes I gave away. That would not be pretty.

Everything about my life right now feels like I'm at the, "Ok, I warned you!" stage, that split second of decision time just before your common sense takes over and pulls you back or you go for it anyway and the tale, should you live to tell it, starts with, "See, what had happened was..."

The gas spike had a domino effect at our house. At nearly $80 a tankful at peak prices, our budget took a hit. Prices on some items we buy regularly, like diet soda, went up and have stayed up. We made adjustments, switched to store brands, bought less. We didn't suffer, mind you...just shifted to a more conservative spending pattern. Same with the weight loss. We didn't suffer. I cooked more at home, made healthier meals, smarter snack choices, exercised more. Because we went out less, we spent more time at home getting stuff done and being together.

It probably comes as no surprise that we actually enjoyed ourselves. Driving slower is less stressful; driving less is bliss. Spending less wasn't painful; it was kind of fun to see how creative we could be. Healthy food is delicious, fresh and light and tasty. I looked forward to my daily walks. So why oh why would we go back to the old ways?

For that matter, why would any of us? Did you make adjustments when gas was so pricey? Have you kept them up? At $4.00 a gallon or $1.45, driving is no bargain. You could make gasoline free and it wouldn't reduce the damage we do every time we fire up Bessie in the driveway. And just because I have the money back in my budget now that gas has gone back down doesn't mean I have to spend it. If we were happy and healthy on less, why spend more? I have plenty of bills and debt that would benefit from the application of a little more cash each month. And before you raise the, "We need to spend to stimulate the economy!" flag, I'm not talking about hording money under my mattress (though I really wish my 401K had been under my mattress); I'm talking about spending wisely and paying down debt. Reducing debt is good for any economy, and environmental and health concerns don't experience recession.

This is my public commitment to not going back to my pre-warning ways. I'm going to drive less, spend less, eat better, and exercise more. I'm going to start right now by walking away from the computer and getting in a light workout before I start work. I'm working from home, keeping one vehicle off the road today.

We've all been given plenty of warning and now the warnings are getting dire. I challenge you to look at where you are now. Are you playing with the shiny knife again? Put it down! Walk away! There are lots of fun things to do without impaling ourselves on our bad habits.

More wisdom from Mom and good stewardship...

(from a personal email sent to ChattanoogaPagansATyahoogroupsDOTcom, June 2, 2008:

When I was growing up, I thought my mother was the cheapest, stingiest woman on the planet! She reused EVERYTHING!

My dad carried sandwiches for lunch every day for years so we went through a lot of sliced bread. She carefully shook the crumbs out of the empty bread bags, folded them, and put them inside another saved bread bag in the drawer. Those bags got used for everything. We wrapped left over biscuits after dinner in them (which were, in turn, resued as biscuit toast for breakfast the next morning). We saved receipts in them. We split them down the seam and used them to cover a bowl that didn't have a lid (secured with a rubber band saved from something else).

Wax paper was the absolute gold standard for wrapping sandwhiches, and if Dad remembered to bring it home, it was sometimes resued, too. There was no plastic cutlery in our house. If Dad needed a spoon or fork, Mom took one out of the drawer and Dad brought it home to be washed. By the way, my Mom STILL uses much of the same set of stainless tableware we had back then, so I know that process worked!

Empty mayonnaise jars were used as canning jars, nail containers, bean canisters, etc. When Mom bought things like Zip-Lock bags, they were reused, too. In fact, she still saves them and has so many empty, washed clean, and carefully saved bags that she probably won't have to buy another for years! Popcorn came in just one bag, not a box with six bags inside it, each one wrapped individually in plastic. Cheese had one wrapper on it instead of an outer wrap and a wrapper around each slide. Things that grew out of style or didn't look quite as shiny and new as before were still used as long as they retained usefullness; Mom still has the same Charles Chips can she had when I was a child and still stores flour in it, and it works just fine.

She made new clothing out of old clothing and out of cloth flour sacks (not seen much anymore, but they do still make them), dust cloths out of old tee shirts, biscuit/cookie cutters from empty vegetable cans. We picked up hickory nuts and made hickory nut pies instead of pecan, made the best pear preserves in the world from knotty old Keiffer pears we picked up from old trees in the pasture, and ate persimmons, blackberries, dewberries, and mucadines we found wild in the woods. She and Dad grew much of what we ate, saving seed from one harvest to start the next. Dad kept a few cattle almost all the time, selling a few and using a couple a year to stock the freezer. The beef we ate was wrapped in a single piece of butcher paper with the contents written right on the paper, not in a stryofoam tray with an absorbant pad and a plastic overwrap with a paper label. Found objects and windfalls were put to good and lasting use; when my aunt was given l arge commercial spools of sewing thread, Mom and my grandmother carefully selected multiple strands of complimentary colors and wound them into balls of "yarn," crocheting clothing from it, some of which I still have and wear.

After that wonderful example of good stewardship, all I could do when I grew up was run madly from it and try to become much more sophisticated. I learned how to buy plastic bags and only use them once...how to through away empty glass jars because I didn't can my own food (why, when it was so eash to buy it at the grocery?), ignore healthful, readily available food because it was too much effort to pick it, and to just chuck my old tee shirts and buy nice, neatly trimmed wash cloths new and use them for dusting and cleaning. Food scraps were just trash. I never reused bread bags because when I did, my friends said, "Ewwwwwwwww! That's not sanitary!" Somehow it didn't occur to me that A) the bread came wrapped in it and we didn't say, "Ewwww!" and B) I was over 20 years old and hadn't died from it in all that time.

So here I am, many years later, looking at Mom (right next door) and finally thinking, "You were one smart woman!" She was a much better steward of the land we have chosen to call home than I ever was. I'm learning all over again what it means to keep the promises Three Crows and I made when we moved up here. There are so many things that I can do that not only reduce my impact on the environment but save resources that my family can use for other things.

What has helped more than anything is awareness. From the moment we stood in what is now our back yard and promised to be good stewards and partners with this land, we have been more aware. By stating and sharing our intention out loud, we moved it from a nice thought to an act of will. As simple as that sounds, I believe it has been key to moving us more and more in the right direction. And conversations like this one have the same effect. As we raise our awareness, more opportunities will present themselves.

Is our family "there" yet? Heck, no! But we're closer...much closer...and like all journeys, this one starts with a single step. With the way we work now, I'm not sure returning to my Mom's way of life is entirely possible, but many of her tricks are already serving us...both our family and the big us...well...and we're enjoying the process as well as the product.

I guess it's like the rest of life - doing the right thing feels good.

Love in abundance,

Heartsong

Come Saturday morning...

...I'll be doing my regular Saturday stuff and loving it.

I cherish Saturday mornings for a lot of reasons. It's the first no-alarm-clock day of every week. I get to wake up with my beloved; we cuddle and make love and laugh and wish the coffee would make itself.

After breakfast, I tackle my two Saturday chores - trash and recycling. The trash run isn't exactly fun, but it's satisfying to get the bags of yuck off property and into the landfill. Recycling, on the other hand, is one of the highlights of my week.

We do what I call "big chunk" sorting throughout the week; steel and aluminum cans go into one container, paper into another, glass and plastic into a third, or sometimes in with the paper. Come Saturday morning, I take it all outside to the big table and sort everything. It can get a little messy but I don't mind. It all gets loaded into Bessie (our trusty Ford Ranger, 190-odd thousand miles and still going strong) for the trip to the recycle center.

This is my friend G___. Actually, he's just a guy I met this morning at the center and I don't really know anything about him except that he recycles. He gives up part of his Saturday to keep some of his family's trash out of the landfill. That's good enough for me to call him a friend. He was a nice guy with a good sense of humor; when I promised him I wouldn't identify him or say where he was from, he immediately replied, "Thank God! I have to beat off the stalkers already." A good steward and a quick wit...what's not to like?

The recycle center was full of people like G___ and me today. That gives me hope. There aren't enough of us yet, but the numbers are growing, and every can, bottle, and bag that G___ and I and others like us recycle is one that doesn't wind up in the landfill. It's a small thing, but it's important and I'm happy to be part of it.

To G___ and all recyclers, reusers, reducers...thank you. Enjoy your recycling chore...it's an act of love and life.

Yes! Do this...do this do this do this!

Precycling - what a great concept!

Precycling refers to the process of reducing the amount of trash, recycleable or otherwise, on the front end...

...avoiding excessive packaging;
...refusing what you don't need;
...reducing what you do need;
...reusing what you can't reduce;
...recycling what you can't use;
...rebuying recycled material whenever possible.

When I was growing up, my parents did this all the time. I just thought they were stingy and tight with the little bit of money they had, which was cool in itself - they made a little do a whole lot. What I didn't realize is what good stewards they were. When I left home, I gradually drifted away from those practices, but I'm relearning them now.

For more good information, visit http://www.summitrecycling.org/html/prere.html (where the precycle list came from) or their parent site, http://www.highcountryconservation.org/.

Do this...this matters.