When I was a little boy, one springtime my grandmother led me and some of my cousins out into the woods by her farmhouse. I was so young that I honestly don't remember which of my cousins were with us, but I do remember that day quite clearly otherwise. It was a chilly spring day in Minnesota. The air was cold in the shade, but just beginning to feel warm in the sunshine that flooded the open fields of LeSueur County.
It wasn't often that our grandma took us on walks, but that day was special. She wanted us to learn how to look for spring wildflowers...
And there they were!
Jack-in-the-Pulpits, Dutchman's Britches, and Early Buttercups. As we followed behind this slow-moving woman in a hand-made dress, we came upon a riot of small, delicate flowers growing from the feet of maples and elms that formed a woods across from the farm where my grandma lived in her old age, and my father grew up.
Grandma took care to teach us that these flowers grew on the southern side of the trees, that they were looking for the sunshine...and that every spring, sure as the changing of the seasons, you could find them pushing up in the still-cold woods as a sign of great things to come.
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My grandmother was born in 1894. She was a public schoolteacher and a mother of seven. Two of her sons served in WWII, two of her daughters moved out of state to work in the war industry during that time of great upheaval. Her husband, my grandfather, much older than her, died before I was born. Late in life she worked as a factory worker at the Green Giant cannery to qualify for Social Security benefits.
She was a woman of deep faith and a gentle nature. She loved to read, and I learned how to read, like so many before me, nestled in her lap. Grandma's house did not have running water. Water came from a pump close to the fields--about twenty-five yards from the house. When I was a little boy, this was still a conventional, manual hand pump which I would beg to be allowed to prime and pump for our water.
Ah, to be a child again!
Later the pump was electric, and a bright yard light was added to shine above it in the nighttime. As I grew in strength, I would proudly carry the heavy plastic buckets back inside, taking care not to slosh the water over the side. Lessons you learn when you are young stick with you.
There were two water basins in grandma's house. One big one, with soapy water and a big ladle that you could use to wash your hands. One small one, with a small ladle that you could use to pour a glass of drinking water. These made a big dipper and a little dipper. You didn't confuse the two!
My father taught us that you could see these dippers in the night sky. One of them even pointed to the North Star. You could remember that fact, he said, and always be able to find your way home.
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It wasn't just water and electricity that was different on the farm. Farm gardens were huge. My dad reminds me that this was because you would plow them. In early days with a horse and plow, and later with a tractor. The farm garden I remember from my childhood had corn and beans and squash and onions and tomatoes and carrots and potatoes and was big enough you could play hide-and-go-seek in it. The corn was planted in thick rows. As my father says, "Corn likes to be planted big."
Knowing this, it always makes me sad to see a thin and lonely row of corn standing bedraggled in an urban garden. Farm families have plenty of these parcels of folk wisdom.
My favorite one from my grandmother was, "Always boil your potatoes until they smile at you."
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I have a simple point here.
My grandmother lived her whole live without indoor running water. Electricity came relatively late. Heat came from a wood stove which in Minnesota meant that in later years, grandma came to stay in the city for the winter. Two things about this are true. There was nothing lacking from her life and our lives that was essential. We had love. We had each other. My grandmother had a deep bond with the seasons, with the land around us, and she shared that with us. Teaching your children about survival was a part of living. But it's also true that this was a difficult life for those who lived it.
When I ask my father, now 81, who grew up with kerosene light until the 1950s and chopped wood for heat in the winter, he thinks most people in the United States would simply find it too uncomfortable to live like this again. He points out that there are countless skills you learned as a farm child and that many of these lessons have been lost. Even my friends who practice urban gardening and permaculture are pessimistic about this. We will never give up our huge freezers and refrigerators (gotta keep that year old jar of mustard cold, cold, cold!), our indoor plumbing, our McMansions, our air conditioning, our hot showers, our freeway commutes.
And my friends may well be right.
It can feel useless to talk about using less electricity and water and oil and growing some of our food because it makes people feel that the only way to conserve and reduce and reuse is to become what they see in their mind's eye as a parody of a "back to the land" luddite, a Portlandia cartoon caricature.
But that's simply not true.
It's not who we are, it’s not where the technology is, if we choose to develop it, and, in point of fact, it's not where any of us are really from. Making changes in how we live and the regulations we impose on our economy and the strategies we write into our laws to protect the earth and build a sustainable future are more important than ever.
And that's why I am telling you this story.
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Like so many of our grandparents, my grandmother was resilient. She knew how to teach her community's children. She grew her own vegetables, canning in the summer and cooking for flavor through the long winter. She not only knew how to butcher a hog, but she insisted on doing so, because she knew that she would make the right cuts and waste as little as possible.
My friends are right. People in the USA today aren't likely to use smaller refrigerators en masse (or share them!) We aren't going to give up our ice cold ketchup. We're not likely to learn how butcher chickens and pigs, even though this used to be commonplace. Heck, most of us won't make a move to stop driving carbon-burning cars until the oil dries up from the ground and the oceans are up to our eyeballs.
But it wasn't too long ago that our grandmothers and grandfathers lived a sustainable and organic lifestyle. They were resilient and adaptable and they paid attention to the world around them. They made sure the next generation knew, to the best of their knowledge, what it takes to survive and thrive. While most of us are unlikely to ever live without electricity and running water, we are, all of us, facing the certainty of a rapidly changing climate.
Our children face even greater change. Our grandparents' resilience, their skills and values, are needed, now, more than ever, as we face a man-made climate crisis.
And today, in an America awash in consumerism and a click-bait culture, I think back on what my grandmother taught us children in the woods all those years ago. There's a cycle to the seasons, and there is joy in the wildflowers. They are seeking the sun and a sign of good things to come.
Today, I ask myself, haven't we had enough of a wholly plastic, disposable culture? Haven't we had enough of this entirely consumption-based lifestyle? What has it gained us?
Why can't we open our eyes and see that most of the best things in life, in all their richness, are right there in front of us on this precious planet that we share?
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That's the lesson my grandmother was teaching us all those years ago.
I certainly did not know at the time, but she was teaching us precisely so that we might share with others someday. She taught me how to find spring wildflowers as a child, and all that was bundled into it, so that I might pass her lessons on to you.
This is nothing exceptional. That is how it has always been for us human people.
Our grandmothers have always been teaching us how to be resilient, how to survive in a world poised between scarcity and abundance. Grandmothers around the globe have always knowingly held the future in their hands, and nurtured it.
This is a gift we have been given, collectively; it’s our shared inheritance.
The question for all of us, in 2019, is what we going to do with it?