SIMPLE GREEN
Confessions of a Former Earthchild
A Memoir By
Deborah J. Lightfoot
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Copyright (c) 2011 by Deborah J. Lightfoot
Smashwords Edition 2011
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SIMPLE GREEN
Confessions of a Former Earthchild
A Memoir By
Deborah J. Lightfoot
On my father’s farm, environmentalists grew with the cotton. I was my daddy’s Earthchild. In my earliest memories I’m clambering over the West Texas sandhills past straight rows of crops. I’m digging bare toes into the cool dampness that hid beneath sun-blasted surfaces. I’m sharing with the rattlesnakes the scant shade under the cockleburs along the fencerows.
The land nourished me. Quantities of arable soil made their way into my mouth. I ate dirt and it did me good. Modern science reveals that children from antiseptically clean, urban homes are more prone to asthma and allergies than those who grow up in rural environments. Though I waded in stock tanks awash in cow manure, I suffered few infections, never had asthma, seldom saw a doctor for any childhood complaint.
Our family wasn’t big on going to the doctor. My mom treated my itchy chickenpox with calamine lotion. When I dropped a knife-edged sheet of tin on my foot and nearly cut off a toe, she doused it with Merthiolate and wrapped it in a cotton rag. The active ingredient in Merthiolate is toxic and a cause of birth defects. Luckily for me, my sliced toe bled so profusely it washed out the poison. I wasn’t rushed to the doctor, neither then nor when a rabbit bit me. Both wounds healed with little scarring and no complications—no rabies or tetanus. Growing up on a farm makes for a wonderfully vigorous immune system.
Past fifty now, I still reap the benefits. I’ve been hospitalized only once, to have my wisdom teeth out. My tonsils and appendix live in me still. I can eat almost anything and not get sick. On trips to Mexico I enjoy lettuce salads and fresh tropical fruits, indulgences that leave most turistas throwing up their toenails. Blessed are we who had the chance to eat dirt and muck about in cow shit.
Few people remember Euell Gibbons now, but he was my childhood hero. Mr. Gibbons showed my generation how to eat naturally, how to live off the land, foraging for our food outdoors like primitive hunter-gatherers. Like him, I was game to try anything: roots and shoots, dandelion crowns, cattails, tree bark. These days when I go hiking I’ll taste any fruit, grain, or berry that lines the trail, picking them fresh from field or forest as Euell taught me. My husband swears I’ll poison myself someday. He’s probably right. As a young thing I nibbled an oleander blossom and swelled up like a toad, Mom said. I don’t remember that. But I now know that one leaf of an oleander is enough to cause death. Eating any part of the plant can stop your heart. Euell didn’t tell me that.
I went to college to become a park ranger or a wildlife biologist. Those ambitions succumbed to the impatience of youth. When the subject of careers arose, my professors let slip that jobs for rangers or ecologists were few and far between. This was the 1970s, at the dawning of the environmental movement. We had Earth Day (first celebrated in 1970) and the Clean Water Act of ’72, but we didn’t have anything approaching a “green” industry. (The twenty-first century hasn’t yet reached the healthy shade of green we should be enjoying, this many years on. But we’re getting there. More about that in a bit.)
The prospect of unemployment scared me. I wanted work after graduation, I needed work, and so I quit as a wildlife science major and switched to agricultural journalism. I’d grown up on a farm; I’d written since my earliest days as a crayon-wielding diarist: the combination fit. And I knew firsthand that farmers were not the rape-pillage-plunder-the-Earth villains that urban ignorance held them to be. I’d watched my daddy put on the brakes, stop his tractor dead in the field even with the day’s last precious rays of sunlight fading in the west, so he could jump down and move a box turtle or a bird’s nest safely out of the plow’s path. My dad’s environmentalist instincts ran deep.
Now I survey my tech-laden home and I wonder what happened to me. What became of that primitive nature-lover who went barefoot through dunghills and wanted to live like a savage? I have all the comforts: a microwave oven, a fax machine, central heating and air; two computers, two printers, two scanners, two DVD players not including the ones built into the computers; four phones counting landlines and cells. How did I become so materialistic? When and why did I replace simplicity with clutter?
The seeds of my undoing were planted in college, I now see, when I gave up life as a naturalist and settled down to write. A journalism student must have a typewriter. That first portable manual started me down a road that’s led to my electronic office. Every surface around me bristles with equipment—each piece necessary to my work, I choose to think. The stuff in this one room would more than fill the back of a pickup truck. And once upon a time, everything I owned fit in the trunk of my beat-up Chevy Malibu.
If I stand on the landing at the head of the stairs, I can see into our guest room, a space that’s become a sort of shrine to dead parents. My husband’s mother’s bedroom suite ended up here, as did my mother’s knickknacks and stacks of family photos. Mom looks across the room at me, her quizzical smile making me wonder what she was thinking when I took that photo of her during one of our calmer Christmas reunions. For five years we hadn’t been on speaking terms, and during that estrangement we had no Christmas get-togethers, stormy or otherwise. I don’t know which of us was the bigger fool … or maybe I do.
Among the familiar faces decking my guest-room walls is the baby picture of a stranger. His name’s George Hattie, and I never met the man. His portrait hung in a house in Mexico that my husband and I bought in 1997.
I pointed out the picture to the norteamericana from whom we purchased the property. “That’s a beautiful family photo,” I said. “Don’t you want to take it with you?”
The woman snorted. “That’s just George.” With a dismissive wave of her hand, she added: “I never had any use for him.”
George had been the woman’s stepfather, the later-in-life husband of a mother who was, by all accounts, an ogress. With the mother and George both deceased, the couple’s norteamericana heir had acted with unseemly haste to put their home on the market. The woman removed few of her mother’s belongings, and even fewer of George’s, before selling us the place. So we got a property that was overrun with other people’s mementos. Abandoned keepsakes spilled from every room.
I left George’s picture hanging on the wall just as it was. Whatever faults the adult Hattie may have had, his baby picture is a work of art. It’s set in a round, elaborately decorated antique frame of plaster. The portrait of a baby boy in a frilly dress is signed “Gauvin & Gentzel, Halifax, Can.” A little online research leads me to deduce that George was born in Nova Scotia in the 1910s, when those signature photographers were building a reputation in Canada. George’s other possessions that came to us with his house tell of his travels. In 1936 he inscribed a copy of The Modern Cook Book for the Busy Woman (Including a Complete Guide to Kitchen Management): “To my wife, Mrs. George Hattie, Seattle, Washington … The way to win and hold a man’s heart is through his stomach. From Your Husband.”
Chauvinist.
At some point, George left Washington and moved south along the Pacific Coast. Covering the walls of his home in Mexico were oil paintings by California artists, and in his desk I found crumbling, yellowed stationery from Carmel-by-the-Sea.
We don’t know when he lost the Seattle-era Mrs. Hattie and remarried, or when he retired to Mexico. But he lived there long enough to carve himself a place in the local folklore. After we turned his home into our summer getaway, we heard tales about George’s collection of gold coins. One neighbor reported being in the room when George showed off the collection in a large, elegant display box. Everyone supposed it was fabulously valuable, and no one seemed to know what became of it. We heard rumors that the unsympathetic stepdaughter, having inherited George’s home when her ogreish mother died, went poking a metal rod around the garden, searching for the treasure’s hiding place. Maybe she found it and took it away. In our eight summers at the house, I did a fair amount of gardening and never turned up gold buried beneath the bougainvilleas.
When we sold out and came home to Texas, I brought George’s baby picture with me. It seemed cruel to forsake him in a foreign country where his name would be forgotten and his likeness lost. The next owners of the house might use the elaborate plaster frame for a baby picture of their own brood, and George’s portrait would end up in the dust bin.
I’ve thought of searching the Internet for Hattie relatives who might want their ancestor’s photograph. But that seems like an overly generous favor to extend to a stranger. The best place for George, perhaps, if they’ll have him, is at the Dalhousie University archives in Halifax. Their website tells me they already have one George Hattie on file, a land surveyor who was mapping Nova Scotia in 1858. For all I know, my George is the man’s direct descendant.
As I stand on the stairs of my Texas home and look down into the living room, it hits me that I can’t leave any bits of history behind—not my own or anyone else’s. That’s why my possessions won’t fit in the trunk of my car anymore. I couldn’t leave George behind; I’ve been compelled to bring him along into a new century and search for a suitable place to settle him. It’s the same with a cartload of other knickknacks. Half the objects I see from the stairs aren’t things I’ve bought for myself, they’re other people’s stuff that I ended up with.
The carved animal figures atop my bookcases were George’s. We brought them back from Mexico with us, another piece of his history that I had to preserve. A couple of the paintings on my walls belonged to my husband’s mother. Other paintings are by my mom’s hand—she was an artist. And propped on the fireplace mantel are handcrafted pewter plates from Mexico that I’d sent abroad as gifts. The plates came back to me after the recipients died.
I never thought of it at the time, but a great many of the presents I gave my mother over the course of decades were destined to arrive back in my hands. I’m wearing clothes I bought for her; I’m reading books I inscribed to her.
It’s her jewelry, though, that packs the emotional wallop. When I opened her jewel box after her death, staring at me were pieces I’d picked up for her from every place I’ve traveled: a scarf clip from England, earrings from Canada, a pendant of Mexican silver. Deeper lay necklaces and rings I remembered from my childhood. I’d played dress-up with them. The oldest items in the box date to my mother’s girlhood: a pin from the 1936 Texas Centennial celebration; a heart-shaped locket enclosing tiny photos of the aunt and uncle who sort of raised her; silver-mounted turquoise from New Mexico, her birthplace. My mother’s history and my own entwine in that jewelry box. And someday the next generations will have to decide what to do with those bits of family history.
I read a magazine article by a man—David Dudley, a New York writer who’s about my age—who was forced to rid his parents’ home of thirty-odd years of clutter. Health problems compelled the elderly couple to take a one-bedroom apartment and give up their big house with its overstuffed basement. Dudley described the decluttering as combat: pitched battles with his mother over dusty dishes she couldn’t bear to part with; struggles on a mythological scale against a relentless accumulation of stuff, belongings, bric-a-brac. “We were at war,” he wrote, “engaged in a desperate guerrilla campaign against a faceless enemy that had insinuated itself into every crevice and nook.” (David Dudley, “Conquering Clutter,” AARP The Magazine, January/February 2007, page 49)
I found his account blood-chilling. Looking around at all the stuff to which I’ve given houseroom, I fear for the sanity of my young relatives who may one day have to deal with it all.
They’ll have it easy, though, compared to what my husband and I faced when his only child, Paul, died by violence. We were left to sort out the shattered fragments of Paul’s half-life. I call it that, not because he lived timidly or halfway, but because half a lifetime is all he got. He chose poorly, he married badly, and she ended him. It’s not in the natural way of things for parents to pack up the belongings of their dead children and give all to charity. We couldn’t do it. Most of Paul’s things we gave to the people who loved him and mourned him, but many we kept for ourselves … more bits of lost days to fill up the nooks and crannies of our home.
My mother-in-law, my mother, George, Paul: one by one they’ve died and left us their stuff. I tell myself that I’m not to blame, given the circumstances, for abandoning simplicity and surrounding myself with all these objects. To the casual observer I may look like the worst sort of materialist, a practitioner of over-consumption. But if they’ll look a little closer, they’ll see that frenzied shopping at department stores and outlet malls did not create this clutter. I’ve been collecting specimens, like an archaeologist who brings back artifacts to document dead civilizations. My home is becoming a museum, a repository for precious bits of other people’s histories.
If I think about it the right way, I can believe that my curatorial impulses have been good for the environment. What’s in my house is not in a landfill, obviously. I’m practicing the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Objects from four far-flung households are daily recycled. I use kitchen gadgets that once belonged to my mother and my husband’s mother; my garlic press and my cream pitcher were George’s. Shelves and CDs in the guest room were Paul’s. Anyone who visits me rubs up against the history of my people.
But here in my office, across the hall from the guest room, I’m less green and less nostalgic. Modern, energy-eating, high-tech objects dominate this room. Except for a watercolor that belonged to George, and the scarf draping a lampshade, Professor Trelawney–style, in memory of a writer friend who died in a car crash, everything in this room got here because I purchased it in the best tradition of American gadget-hunger. No one visiting my office would guess that I began life as an environmentalist. I don’t even use recycled printer paper—it costs too much and it doesn’t feed right through my machines.
I try to redeem myself through my work. I help to teach young people about ecology, biology, the natural sciences, environmental issues. And I do it from an office at home, which means I’m not burning gas for a daily commute. That must count in my favor. On the floor is a bin where I toss rough drafts and failed attempts. My husband takes our used paper to a recycling container near a local school. They sell it to finance the sports teams and the marching band. That’s a star in my crown, right?
Yet I can’t help recalling the exuberant appreciation for nature that was mine in childhood. Today my favorite break from the computer is to go for a long ramble in the woods. Enjoying the occasional nature walk pales, however, beside the commitment required of a career environmentalist. Where would I be today, I wonder, if I’d curbed my youthful impatience and stuck it out to become a scientist? Would I have been the one who discovered the bacteria that eat oil spills at sea? Would I have pioneered the making of jackets and pants from recycled plastic bottles?
Happily for today’s young nature-lovers, pro-environment jobs can be had. Business in America is finally catching on: green is good. Green saves money. Green is profitable. Big corporations are constructing environmentally friendly buildings that take their power from the sun, their heat from the earth, and their water from recycled supplies. They burn their wastes to make electricity. They put up wind turbines, clean up emissions, and do more with less. Want a job to feel good about? From architectural designing to zinfandel winemaking, you’ve got choices in today’s environment. And the planet you save will be your own.
Me? I work around the clutter in my house to replace the incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents. I think about adding insulation to the attic, and I put that on the home spruce-up list for springtime (when it’ll be too hot to work in the attic). I plant trees in the yard; they’ll be big enough to shade the roof in about a decade.
I’m past the point of contributing anything major like oil-eating superbugs or hydrogen-powered automobiles. I’ll keep writing about such innovations, though, and maybe my words will inspire some energetic young person to become a scientist and alter the course of human history. Maybe that’s been my role all along: to work in the background, spread the word, and nudge a few people in the right directions.
“Grow where you’re planted”—a cliché, but it’s the answer to my dilemma. No point now in wondering what my life would have been if I’d followed my hero, Euell Gibbons, into the woods and never come out. I’m here, sitting at the computer … not there, sampling the algae in pond scum or living in a thatched hut while tagging endangered amphibians. I made my choice and it’s good. I’ve given voice to my creative urges, authoring books and articles and a trilogy of fantasy novels, all dealing in some way with my twin passions: history and ecology. (The threat of global environmental catastrophe drives the plot of my faux-medieval WATERSPELL novels. Go figure.) At a keyboard isn’t where I meant to be planted, but it’s here that I am and here that I’ll grow.
Before I pass from this good Earth, though, I must do something with all the sentimental knickknacks that fill my house. If I leave them to the next generations, the municipal landfill may feel the strain. Does anybody know of a green museum that needs these specimens I’ve collected from the lost lives of my people? I’ll pay the shipping. You have to promise to recycle the boxes.
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About the Author
Deborah J. Lightfoot got attached to history through her grandfather, a High Plains cowboy. From her mother, an artist and avid reader, came her love of books and all things mysterious and magical. Deborah has had a fondness for dark horsemen since Richard Boone’s Paladin rode through TV landscapes wielding a six-shooter instead of a sword. Six-shooters figure in her award-winning books about the American Southwest: Trail Fever (William Morrow) and The LH7 Ranch (University of North Texas Press). Swords and sorcery provide the thrills in WATERSPELL, an intricate fantasy trilogy with medieval overtones and a few nods to history. A journalism graduate (summa cum laude) of Texas A&M University and an Authors Guild member, Deborah is in educational publishing as a freelancer for a national nonprofit organization. Besides writing, editing, and ingesting books, her pleasures include traveling abroad and hiking the Yorkshire moors, Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park, and while living in Mexico part-time, that country’s La Primavera Bosque. She and her husband reside in rural Texas in a house they designed and built themselves. On the Web: djlightfoot.blogspot.com
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