From the Archives: Why Labels Aren’t Necessarily Bad

I am in the process of closing down my first blog, but there are a few posts I don’t want to lose. Here’s the first one from my blog archives, an essay I read as my contribution to a panel about autism at a local health expo last year.

I left out one important detail, because I knew that the brilliant Michele Bombardier, who was also part of the panel, would bring it up: There is solid evidence that parental concern about a child’s development is highly predictive of the existence of a developmental issue. In other words, any time a parent is worried because their child doesn’t seem to be developing typically, their health care providers should perk up, take that seriously, and start gathering data to illuminate the truth about that child’s development. Sadly, it seems to be common for doctors to say things like “Don’t worry” and “Let’s wait and see” and “Oh, no, I’m sure everything is fine” in response to parents’ concerns. I will link to the studies re: parental concern and developmental issues as soon as I have time to track them down again – They really do exist.

I love public speaking, and I used to be able to breathe and speak and enjoy myself while talking away to a roomful of strangers. But whenever I talk about this topic, I struggle to breathe, to keep my voice from wobbling, to read my own words without stumbling over and over them. Anyway, here’s what I shared:

When my daughter was almost 5 years old, after many years of asking her various doctors for explanations and assistance, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

I was so accustomed to being told that my child would “grow out of it”, or that my first-time-mother eyes were over-reacting, I fully expected to leave the neurologist’s office with more of that same message. Still, I can’t say this diagnosis was much of a surprise to me. It explained the things I’d been pointing out to friends and family starting during her newborn days: Her active avoidance of eye contact, her lack of babbling, her obsession with ceiling fans, the long lines of plastic animals stretching across the living room (arranged by species, color and size, feet all perfectly aligned), her very negative feelings about playgrounds, play dates, and parties. The afternoon we drove home from our diagnostic appointment with the pediatric neurologist, I was filled with overwhelming relief, and a sort of giddy happy-sadness, or was it sad-happiness…I’m sure there’s a German word for this complex emotion, but everything I felt was shot through with relief: Relief that this label would bring with it access to all sorts of professional help; relief that now I’d be able to focus on articles, studies, and ideas that would help me understand my child; relief that there would be no more midnight Googling of keywords and fragments of the whole that brought terrifying misinformation; relief that I would finally be able to help her to be a happier person, to have a happy childhood.

I know that not everyone wants an autism spectrum diagnosis for their child, but the idea of a label didn’t scare me. I was more worried about the labels my child was already getting from her peers, teachers, and family members in the absence of a more official explanation. We needed help, and I was open to anything that would articulate how my child experiences the world, how to meet her where she was, and how to help her realize her potential. Being diagnosed on the autism spectrum didn’t change my child, and it didn’t change my love for her. My goals as a parent are the same as they were when I first felt her rolling like a sleepy, tangled eel in my body, or when I first held her glowing body in my arms – I want to be the sort of mother who can help her become a happy person, a person with a love of learning, with a love for other people and trust in their love for her, and a love for the world that translates into acts of loving-kindness, a person who has a rewarding and happy life.

Fortunately for my child and for every other child diagnosed today with ASD, there has never been a better time to be growing up with autism. There are professionals in a wide variety of fields who will not give up, who are researching and working and experimenting, thinking in new ways, and this has brought us concrete help. There is a vibrant ASD community that is connecting people with ASD to each other in new ways, and that is helping those of us in the neurotypical world to understand that everyone, even someone who is non-verbal, has plenty to say, that everyone matters. There are other parents who are traveling the same path, parents who really do know what I mean when I say that our trip to the bulk department of the grocery store didn’t go so well, and who share my deep joy when things do go well at a birthday party.

All of this has added up to mean that my child is much happier today than she was 3 years ago; it means that she is growing up in a society in which autism is no longer invisible, and she benefits from this increased awareness, this growth both in compassion and in research; it means that I am a better parent because I better understand my child, and have found ways to nourish her, body, mind, and soul.

Please, if you suspect that your child may have autism, don’t give up – Be assertive, be bold, know that you are not alone, your child is not alone. There are people, out there in the wider world and right here, who will stand with you, who can help in many ways.

Local Tips for a Life with Less Plastic

Seeing as how I just posted a lot of this to my friend’s Facebook page (sorry about that, K!), I thought I might as well turn it into a blog post, too.

Over the past year, as part of my ongoing effort to reduce the amount of new plastic entering my life, I’ve developed a shopping system to avoid some common plastic packaging. Here’s a bit about my system and my very local tips for the places where I’ve purchased food in the last year.

I have amassed a collection of glass jars with sturdy lids, everything from Costco-sized artichoke heart jars to baby food jars, with everything in between (I use a lot of quart and pint wide-mouth Mason jars), small tins of food-grade metal, and tightly woven cotton gauze drawstring bags. The jars are mostly from food we’ve eaten, Freecycle, and garage sales, but once in a while I have to buy a case of new Mason jars to replace those I’ve given away and the ones I have stashed in the freezer, full of fruit or soup. I’ve purchased the tins and cotton bags at close to wholesale prices through the buying club I belong to.

shopping basket

During T&C’s annual African basket sale, I bought a large market basket – These are incredibly sturdy and worth the price. I love my basket. Comparable baskets are much more online than from T&C during their summer sale, and I believe these are Fair Trade baskets. I pack my jars, tins, cotton bags, and large grocery bags into my market basket along with a black Sharpie (the main plastic item in my system – I haven’t found a workable alternative yet), a roll of unbleached waxed paper, and some unbleached waxed paper bags (Azure Standard has the waxed paper products for a good price).

Town & Country and Central Market:

If I’m shopping at T&C, my first stop is the bulk department, where I stand in line to ask one of the cashiers to weigh my containers and write the tare on the lid. The bulk department is staffed by very patient and accommodating people, and they’re used to people bringing in containers from home. I haven’t had to ask anyone at Central to mark a tare on a container for me, but I’m sure they’d be similarly helpful.

Sometimes I’ll bring in a container that still has some food in it from my last trip – Some sugar at the bottom of the jar, but not enough for any recipe. When this happens, I stop by the cashier for an updated tare that includes this food, and ask to have it written on a piece of paper for me to hand over w/ the container when I’m checking out.

After I have a tare for everything, even my cotton bags and a representative waxed paper bag (I ask them to write the tare for that on the box of bags, so I have it for future use), I get busy filling the containers up. Small tins and baby food jars are great for dry spices. Cotton bags work very well for beans, nuts, and grains if I’m going to use them immediately, otherwise I’ll use a jar. Really, I use jars for the bulk of my bulk purchases. They work well for bulk nut butters, grains, dried fruits, nuts, seeds, shredded coconut, tea, sugars, chocolate chips, etc.  I prefer glass bottles with a narrower neck for liquids; that narrow neck makes for much easier pouring at home. I use waxed paper bags for things that I don’t usually buy, small items that I need just for some specific recipe, that sort of thing. I write the item number directly on the bag w/ the ball point pens hanging near the bulk bins, and when the bag is worn out, I toss it into my compost pile.

As I fill my jars in the bulk department, I use my Sharpie to write the item # and description on both the lid and jar. This makes it easier for me to keep each jar-lid pair together – Even for mass-produced things like quart Mason jars, the weight of individual jar-lid combos varies greatly. I use jars for items that I buy regularly, using the same jar (and its dedicated lid) for shopping and home storage then for return trips to the store. Sharpie ink stays on my jars and lids through the dishwasher, making this an easy system once you’ve made your original move to jars.

I use cotton bags upstairs for produce, making sure I don’t cinch them tightly closed until after I’ve checked out – I don’t want the cashier to have to wrestle with the drawstring to see what I’m trying to buy. I love storing produce in my cotton gauze bags at home – I can get the bags slightly damp under the tap at home to keep some produce a bit fresher for longer in the fridge, and they work equally well for things that like to stay dry.

I have tried to use my waxed paper and cotton bags for cheese purchases, but the cheese counter people at T&C and Central Market have generally been very resistant to any sort of alternative container. I did once manage to buy a chunk of Parmesan cheese (some of us here have been adding cheese back to our diets after several casein-free years) without plastic wrap from the T&C counter, but that required a written request, a month’s wait, then several phone calls and a rush trip to town to pick up the cheese as quickly as possible after it was cut from the large wheel. Another time, I managed to convince someone behind the cheese counter there to cut some Swiss cheese for me and put it, on a piece of waxed paper, into one of my bags. Along with the cheese, I got this comment “We can do this for you today, but if everyone starts asking us to do this, it won’t work.” Really? What’s to hate about maybe the store would save some money when you don’t have to buy plastic packaging for the cheese, and we’d all have a healthier home? I did my best to keep my smile genuine and my snark to myself. The cheese counter manager at Central Market told me that there was no way I’d get cheese in anything other than plastic wrap; after a little bit of discussion, he was willing to go so far as to say that, if I show up at “exactly the right moment” when they’re cutting and packaging large wheels of cheese, I might be able to get some without the plastic wrap. He also offered to remove the plastic wrap from any chunk of cheese there and throw it into the store’s garbage, but that really doesn’t work to reduce my plastic consumption as far as I’m concerned, so I passed. It has been about 5 months since I’ve visited either cheese counter, and maybe things have changed.

Jars come in handy upstairs if you’re buying things from the salad bar or olive bar, no item # required; you’ll just need to tell the cashier which bar it came from.

I had a quick chat with the very friendly people in the T&C meat department, and they told me they’d be happy to wrap meat in waxed paper for anyone who comes on the days when they package bulk meat. I believe they said this is usually Tuesday and Thursday, but if you’re interested, you should call them or stop by in person. They were genuinely interested in helping out, much more so than, say, the cheese counter.

I’ve promised my kids that I will only have a discussion about plastic with one department of the store per visit when they’re with me, so I haven’t spoken with the seafood counter at T&C yet. I’ll put that on my list and report back. The seafood people at Central were happy to put my order into a large jar; I didn’t ask about waxed paper, but I have a feeling they’d be willing to give it a try.

When I’m checking out at T&C, I use the downstairs cashier whenever I can, or I go to Scott’s aisle if he’s working – He told me once, after I apologized for my assorted containers, that he used to work in bulk and was happy to see people bringing in their own containers. Really, though, I’ve never had a snide comment, heavy sigh, or rolling of the eyes (not that I’ve been able to see, anyway) from any of the T&C cashiers.

One final T&C note: Whenever I have the space and money to buy things in large quantities and I can’t get what I need from Azure Standard, I see Fred in the bulk department. He is happy to place special orders, and I save an additional 10%, T&C’s standard case discount – Since the things I want in large quantities come in paper packaging, this is another way to avoid plastic.

Safeway: Since they don’t have a bulk department, I don’t find a lot to buy from them. But they frequently have better prices for non-bulk things I need, and I need better prices. I haven’t used any jars at Safeway, but I love their self-serve checkout counter. Before I wave anything across the scanner, I press “no barcode” on the screen, then the button that says something like “green discount – bring your own bag”. This gives me a discount of 1 cent, but more importantly, this means I can set  my own heavy bag or basket in the bagging area without setting off alarms at the cashier-guard’s station. If I’m buying produce from them, I remove it from my cotton bag, weigh it, then place it back into the bag and put the whole thing into my basket. So far, that hasn’t set off any weight-triggered alarms, and I don’t feel bad about the bit of extra work since I’m doing it myself.

Pane d’Amore (Lynwood Center on Bainbridge): They are happy to pack bread (including their new gluten-free bread), pastries, and cheese into tins, bags, and waxed paper. I noticed last week that their cheese was already chunked up and wrapped in plastic, but when they first opened, it was being sliced to order from large pieces. I’ll check in with them to see if that is still an option. Along with a cheese counter that is friendly to alternative packaging, they have the best local prices for fancy cheese.

Shima Express:  They are happy to pack their counter food (chicken teriyaki, udon, tempura, etc) into containers that I bring with myself. They are not able to pack sushi into my containers from home, as their ready-to-go sushi is already packed into plastic boxes. They did tell me that, if you order sushi to eat there, it can be made by the sushi chef just downstairs in Shima, if he’s not too busy. I’m assuming I could order sushi to eat there, sit down at a table as if I’m planning to eat there, then slide the sushi from it’s ceramic plate into my container from home. Instead, I just make my own at home to begin with and stick to the other items when we’re treating ourselves to Shima’s food.

Casa Rojas Express: Will only use their own plastic containers and aluminum foil for to-go food. They absolutely will not package food into any other container. They will hold back on plastic utensils, plastic bags, and paper napkins if you ask them to.

That’s all I’ve got for now – I’m sure I’m forgetting something, so maybe I’ll update this post later. Please share your local experiences in the comments – I know there are other options and better systems out there!

Life Without Balloons

Make Banners Not Balloons!

It’s M’s birthday this week, so I spent a bit of time last night getting the dining room ready. My mom always “surprised” us with a decorated table on our birthdays, and I have fun carrying on that tradition. We have a few things that we use for each person’s birthday each year: A personalized birthday sign, a long accordion folded animal train birthday card that my parents gave A on her first birthday, and a vintage porcelain floral frog in the shape of a gander known to us as “The Birthday Goose”. Each birthday person gets to pick flowers for their table and photos or a tablecloth (or both) to go under the Plexiglas cover on the table. My parents gave us the plastic cover cut-to-measure for our table about 6 years ago, and we love to put photos under it. We save our calendars, cut them apart, and use them to decorate the table; sometimes we buy a new calendar when they’re marked down to about $1 each in the summer, so we can add to our collection of table images. This year, A wanted a fancy tablecloth, and M wanted sea creatures (I used a blue tablecloth and photos from a coral reef calendar for her).

The Birthday Goose on A's birthday

On top of all this, for A’s first few years, we bought balloons to tie to the front porch and her chair at the table. By the time M was born, we had stopped buying balloons – Too many popped or floated away, and it was impossible to avoid the truth that we were adding a dangerous sort of refuse to the world. If you live on an island and your birthday balloon floats away, it doesn’t require mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion that your balloon is likely headed for a watery grave.

The Birthday Goose on M's Birthday

Around the same time we gave up on balloons, I came across a no-sew fabric banner project in a Martha Steward Kids magazine. I made a few banners Martha’s way, then I changed the directions a bit to accommodate my lazy self, and to create less waste (there is plastic wrapped along every inch of the fusible tape she calls for). We have enough of these banners now to decorate our dining room, front porch and back yard, all of the places we used to put balloons. It isn’t one of those parental whitewash statements for me to say that my kids love our fabric banners even more than they love balloons.

banners over the birthday table

Here’s how we make them:

Step 1: Get yourself some fabric. Our local fabric shop sells fat quarters meant for quilters, and they’re perfect for our banners, too. We pick out 4 different fat quarters for each banner; this gives enough fabric to put together 2 banners, each 3 yards long, each with 3 different fabric patterns (you can mix and match however  you like, this is just the pattern we use). You could also go with straight yardage for this, but we like both the constraint and variety of the fat quarters – It’s less overwhelming than looking at the entire fabric store, and yet there is enough to choose from that it’s easy to put together a color scheme or other theme. This would be a great way to use old sheets, shirts, or other household fabrics, but we never seem to have anything that can be cut up – Someday!

Step 2: Get yourself some extra wide double fold bias tape, one 3-yard piece per banner, or make your own.

Step 3: Get yourself some craft or fabric glue if you want to make this as a no-sew project. If you want to stitch this together, you’ll need whatever you’d like to use for that – I’m going to give no-sew directions, but feel free to upgrade to the stitched version for less waste and better durability.

Step 4: Make yourself a pattern. I drew a shape I liked freehand, a basic semi-circle with the flat side running 9″ wide x 6.5″ tall. I used the back of some sort of food box and it’s still in great shape 12 banners later.This size works well with 3 yards of bias tape, leaving enough tape on the ends to attach string for hanging, or to pin into.

Step 5: Iron your fabrics then use pinking shears to cut 6 of your shape from each piece of fabric.

Step 6: Decide how you want to arrange your fabrics, then open up that bias tape and start to glue the fabric into place, one piece at a time. Set the straight edge of your fabric pieces even with the inside crease of the bias tape. Before you place the fabric onto the bias tape, put a thin bead of glue on the bottom of the tape, then add another thin bead on top of the fabric and fold the top of the bias tape down flat onto the fabric. Run your fingers over the freshly glued area, pressing gently to stick everything together, then move along to the next piece. It’s a good idea to lay the whole pattern out with the bias tape before you start the gluing, so you know how much bias tape to leave free at each end. As you glue, snug the fabric pieces up so their edges just touch, and set the whole thing where it can dry flat.

Voila! You have a fabric banner that can be tied or pinned into place, indoors or out, good for years of festive decorating. True, the glue makes the bias tape a bit stiff, and it can’t be put through the wash; you can remedy both of those things by sewing everything together. But I’ve been able to decorate years of parties now without having to wash our glued together banners, and nothing has fallen apart when left out in the rain and damp overnight. Sometimes I do need to add a bit more glue to a panel or two, but that’s easy enough to do. Of course, the plastic bottle the glue comes in is wasteful, as is the fabric if you buy it new, but there are no balloons to find their way to the ocean and into some creature’s belly.

back yard banners

No Impact Fail: Filthy Plastic Hypocrite

Or Forbidden Fruit: How My Life as a Schoolyard Sugar Dealer Has Impacted My Thoughts on Plastic Toys

I am a filthy plastic hypocrite. Tomorrow is M’s birthday, so her preschool party is this afternoon. She requested swirled chocolate and fruit cupcakes with swirled blue and green icing, each topped with a plastic sea creature.

My general rule is that, when it’s my money, I get to choose alternatives to plastic. If my kids want plastic toys, they get to spend their own money on them, with no commentary, guilt, or shame piled onto them from me. Most of the time, they have fun finding plastic-free alternatives to things, but there are certain plastic toys that they love and spend a lot of time playing with. It has taken a good bit of work with various therapists to help my kids learn how to play, and I have to admit that I’m not all that torn up about their plastic toys. I’m so happy to see them playing, really playing, with each other, and even alone, I’ve made my peace with this. My hypocrisy bothers me, yes, but the real progress we’ve made in terms of typical play skills must be what keeps me from torturing myself about this in the quiet of the night.

pandas and bamboo, made of marzipan, chocolate & natural coloring

For birthdays, we have a different set of rules. The birthday person chooses their favorite food for the day, and can select whatever they like for their birthday dessert. So far, I’ve been asked to bake all birthday treats, but the day may come when a supermarket cake is the only thing that will do. That will require some serious self-control my part, to keep from wailing about being passed over for one of our local store’s cake lady’s amazing creations, but I’ll follow the birthday rules. Last year, we didn’t have birthday parties, and the year before I was tasked with making marzipan sculptures colored with natural food dyes for their cakes: M wanted pandas and bamboo while A wanted Ursula K. Le Guin’s Red Mare and her foal.

The Red Mare & her foal, made from marzipan and natural coloring

This year, A wanted those crunchy artificially colored sugar bits, the ones stuck to a piece of cardboard, from the grocery store’s cake decor section. M wanted plastic sea creatures, not marzipan, not wood, not felted wool, only plastic sea creatures; also no marine mammals, only sharks and bony fish. And the frosting needed to be dyed with artificial coloring, as my natural green and blue food dyes weren’t the right shade.

So that’s what she got. I just delivered a tray of 15 gluten-free chocolate-squash cupcakes with chemically colored blue and green frosting, topped with 11 plastic sea creatures (the teachers had to do without the plastic critters on theirs) to her class, along with a happy birthday M.

For all that I hate plastic when it’s not a life-saving device, I am a hypocrite when it comes to my kids’ toys, their own purchases, and birthday cake decor. I know my attitude is colored by my experience growing up; in my effort to keep plastic from becoming an alluring forbidden fruit, I willingly purchase the nasty stuff, thereby modeling hypocrisy for my children.

When my sisters and I were growing up, our parents forbade sugar. My mother is an amazing cook and baker, and provided us with all sorts of truly tasty desserts: Wheat germ banana bars, cheesecakes made with eggs from our chickens and geese, raspberry bavarian, gingerbread with lemon sauce, to name just a few of her greatest hits. But we were not supposed to eat candy. At Halloween, we went trick-or-treating only for Unicef, not for candy; if anyone offered us a Milky Way to go with their spare change donation to our orange cardboard collection boxes, we were under strict orders to politely but clearly refuse the sugary gift.

I don’t think this drove my sisters crazy, but it motivated me to pursue a secret life as a candy pusher when I was 12. I commuted across the sound from our island to a school in the big city, and got myself to class each morning on the city bus. In the beginning, my parents gave me quarters to pay for the bus, but then they switched to paper bus tickets. During my after school exploration of the city, I discovered an import store that sold gigantic multi-colored gobstoppers, huge hard spheres of sugar, for just 50 cents. I had a lust for those candies, but didn’t have any pocket-money or allowance to pay for one. I figured out a system to get cash for candy:

I collected morning and afternoon paper transfers from the floor of the bus, from the sidewalks, and from my fellow students. I kept these in a zippered pouch to keep them clean, and when I had a large enough collection, I could find one that worked for almost every day’s fare. The bus system changed the transfer color and letter each day, but I could turn a purple R into a K with judicious finger placement and the right nonchalant body language as I flashed the transfer at the bus driver when we arrived  at my stop.

Whenever I could ride the bus for free that way, I’d trade my paper bus tickets with one of the kids at my bus stop whose parents trusted them with cold, hard change.

I’d run from my return bus stop after school down the waterfront to the import store and buy as many gobstoppers as I could afford.

The next day at school, I’d sell these .50 candies for $1 each to my fellow students at school, kids who had never seen these delights anywhere else so they didn’t know they were being overcharged.

Then I’d take my profits and buy candy, candy, candy. First I bought myself a gobstopper, but then, tucked into the lobby of a skyscraper, I found a tiny old-fashioned candy store whose proprietor was happy to sell me small white paper bags of this and that every afternoon.

I ran this side business until I ran out of takers for the gobstoppers, at which point I lost my huge profits, but could still trade bus tickets for change to spend on candy.

I think back on this now and sort of admire my ingenuity while I’m also disturbed by the depth of my need for sugar. But mostly I’m impressed by the power of forbidden fruit. I have nightmares that my kids will grow up to be PR executives for Dow Chemical or faux scientists whose “research” is funded by oil companies. Right now, letting them make their own choices, even when that includes some things I really do not want in our lives/floating onto our beaches/entering our food web, seems like one of the ways I can avoid turning plastic into a tool they use as they grow into independence. But there is no getting around the fact that I know better and choose hypocrisy.

No Impact Week, Day 8: Eco-Shabbat

My family’s weekly Shabbat is from sundown on Friday to Saturday night when three stars twinkle in the sky; we added Sunday’s Eco-Shabbat theme to our Saturday and Sunday for some extra relaxation and joy this weekend. I am far from Orthodox or Conservative in my observance of Shabbat, but this difference in observance does not change the importance of Shabbat to me and my children. I love Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel‘s description of Shabbat as “a palace in time“. I strive to keep and remember Shabbat by building a palace in time with my family each week.

Every Friday afternoon, we do our best to tidy up the week’s clutter around the house, and definitely in the dining room and living room. Then we turn to making things sweet and beautiful. The kids each have their own special vase used only on Shabbat, and we like to fill these with finds from our yard – Even in the dead of winter, there are bits of beauty we can bring inside to grace our table: Bare twigs from our willow tree, feathers dropped by the Steller’s Jays that raid our bird feeder, dried leaves and seed heads. We make our favorite dinner and dessert, we put on our favorite music, then we light our candles and say the Shabbat blessings. Sometimes we sing out loud, we share our favorite moments from the past week and things we’re grateful for. My main rules for Shabbat are this: We do things as a family, things that bring us joy, things that are not our jobs or regular work. We don’t spend money to buy things, although we do sometimes spend money on experiences (to catch a ferry to see friends, a trip to the zoo). I try very, very hard to find ways to say “yes!” whenever my kids ask me a question:  Can you read this book to me right this minute? Can I play outside in the snow wearing only my underpants and my glittery sandals? Yes, if it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt anyone, yes! Admittedly, our whole Shabbat observance is a work in progress, with things shifting and changing over time as I figure out what feeds the holiness of the day and what erodes that palace in time.

I know, I know, my level of observance doesn’t count as observant at all in the eyes and hearts of many of my faith. That’s OK with me; I’m working with all my heart, all my soul, all my might (or all my “very” as one of my rabbis likes to translate it) to live my life so that the still, small voice within me sings in joy, and that’s enough for me. As Rabbi Shefa Gold writes, “You must dig down beneath the soil of  your everyday life and find its holiness.” I find that making Shabbat every week helps us to do that.

The traditional rules of observance for Shabbat are eco-friendly at their core. Some of the modern practices, such as leaving lights on for the duration of Shabbat, so as to avoid both stumbling in the dark and having to flip the switch between off and on, seem to have an impact on the earth that isn’t kadosh (holy). Of course, my own practice of driving my car to meet friends at the beach on Shabbat must have an even worse impact.

We talked about this on Sunday, and I think we’re all agreed that we’ll start adding some of the more traditional Shabbat practices regarding use of resources to our own observance. I like this intersection of the No Impact Project and my own spiritual path.

No Impact Experiment, Day 7: Giving Back, Marine Plastics Recovery Mission

Today was beautiful here, with sunshine and dramatic clouds and cold air. We decided to take advantage of the break in the rain to meet some friends for one of our regular marine plastics recovery missions, aka picking up plastic trash from the beach.

Here comes a digression. I can’t help myself, I must write a tiny bit about why I am obsessed with plastic, why I feel compelled to use as little of it as I possibly can, and why I think it’s fun to pick up as much marine plastic as I can. Please just skip on ahead of you want to avoid my plastics spiel.

I’ve seen the articles describing one scientist’s claim that the Pacific Gyre isn’t as large as previously believed. I’ll be happy if she’s correct, but I’d hate for that to take our attention from the very real presence of plastic on our local shores. In Puget Sound, our harbor seals are 7 times more contaminated with toxic chemicals than those in Canada’s Georgia Strait north of here. A lot of that contamination undoubtedly comes from industrial pollution, runoff from our lawns and golf courses, etc, but there is evidence that microplastics are entering our marine food webs via filter feeders, who consume these tiny pieces of plastic along with their regular food.

One of the truly nasty things about plastic is that it photodegrades (breaks down in sunlight), but on the whole it does not biodegrade. Yes, it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but these pieces do not break down into individual components that can be recaptured by the food web. In addition to broken pieces of larger plastic items, we commonly find nurdles, the raw feedstock for plastic products. Nurdles are magnets for toxins like PCBs; we’re especially careful about handling these when we find them. Our friends have been collecting nurdles found on our beaches for the International Pellet Watch project – If you come across nurdles in your own area, please consider sending those in, too. This is a great opportunity to spend some time outdoors while doubling as a citizen scientist.

The way I see things now, I’d better really like the plastic that comes into my life since it’s highly likely that my children and I, and you and yours, will be eating it in the future. Literally. It’s so easy for people to think that, because they’re careful about sorting their plastic items for recycling, they don’t contribute to the amount of marine plastic. It’s easy for people to blame others on distant shores or passing boats for the plastics that show up on their local beaches. But research points to all of us as the culprits. I’ve read several estimates, but it seems that many scientists agree that up to 80% of marine plastic debris comes from land-based human trash, working its way down local watersheds to hit local beaches and eventually the oceans. I know I’ve lost at least my share of plastic pens, my kids’ barrettes, pieces of food wrappers, all sorts of plastic bits and bobs. It doesn’t matter how careful we are, we all lose things, garbage is blown from cans and trucks, things drop in many ways.

So, that’s why we grabbed our beach bags and hit the beach for Giving Back day.

We met up with our plastic-obsessed friends at one of our favorite local beaches. This particular beach is a trap for plastic debris; it has an eddy that catches things from the current in the adjacent channel, then southern winds create waves that bring that debris high up onto the shore, especially during the winter. I’m sure this beach has an official name, but we know it as Stinky Beach. It is stinky, especially in the summer sun at low tide, but it’s stinky in a good, beachy way. Before a road was built along the shore, there was a lively estuary here, complete with a salmon run, connecting our watershed to the sound. There is still an estuary, but the stream runs under the road and the salmon have been gone for some time. The road breaks things up, but it also seems to protect the stream and tidal flats from the majority of the plastic debris. Across the road, along the saltwater beach, it’s another story.

Bag of dog poop in the estuary stream.

Along the beach side of the road, where the highest tide line rests, there is a deposit of organic debris (sticks, seaweed, beach grasses, that sort of thing) mixed with expanded polystyrene foam (Styrofoam). We haven’t done the counting yet, but it sure looks as if the foam makes up at least 50% of this mixture. If I dig down, this same mixture goes down as deep as I can easily get with my hands and feet. When I step here, it’s more springy than the mats in our local gymnastics classes; I can really feel the bounce of the foam pellets under my boots.

foam beach

Just below the band of foam soil is a rocky beach, with sand below the average low tide line. We spent about an hour ranging across the beach and estuary, in search of plastic.

We filled 2 1/2 grocery-sized bags with small pieces and found 2 large chunks of expanded polystyrene. The smaller of the foam chunks was home to a little colony of mussels, still very much alive.The foam seemed to have broken off from a dock or float, but it was still mostly intact.

foam bed of mussels

This presented us with a dilemma. Should we carry it to the low tide line and push it back out to sea to give the mussels a chance? If it stayed where it was, it was surely headed up the beach, above the high tide line, where the mussels would die and the foam would break up. Should we scrape the mussels off, knowing they would die in the beaks of gulls and crows, then carry the foam to the landfill? Something else entirely? What would you have done?

chunk of foam crossing stream

Our second, larger chunk of foam had lodged itself against the concrete tunnel that allows the stream to flow from estuary to sound. It took 2 girls to carry it to our collection site, and 1 girl to oversee the work.

There always seems to be a theme to each day’s plastic collection, and today’s was straws. We always find straws and stir sticks, but we found more than usual today, all colors and sizes, many broken up and on their way to becoming microplastics.

The other hot item for the day was curling ribbon from balloons and gifts. My friend had a flash of brilliance, and decided that we should wash the ribbons, make them into bows and post them to our local Freecycle group. We’ll disclose that we found them on the beach and see if anyone would like a chance to turn trash back into gift wrap. Then we decided that we’ll start doing this with all of the useful items we find and see what happens. I have a dustpan in my kitchen that came from one of last year’s plastic beach days, and it works very well; maybe other people are willing to help us reclaim our collective plastic trash. Since it’s going to be around forever, we might as well use it before we eat it.

1 hour of plastic

No Impact Experiment, Day 6: Water.

1 day's rain

Let me be upfront about this: When you live in place famous for its rain, it’s sometimes hard to feel the truth of potable water being rare and precious on a visceral level. We’ve had a bit more rain than usual here this winter, and the sump pump in our crawl space, the one that keeps our floorboards from flooding, has been sucking water out almost every day. We live on the downhill slope of a major groundwater flow in our local watershed, and the groundwater seems to have flooded up to surface level – Walking across our back yard reminds me of hopping across a Scottish peat bog. Given this, I understand why my kids were somewhat puzzled when I told them that today was Water Day. “Well!”, said A, “Then I’m going to use up as much of it as I can!”…We had a short discussion to enlighten her as to why, instead, we wanted to use as little as possible, and we were good to go.

We don’t drink our tap water until it’s been filtered through our Big Berkey to remove any possible pathogens. We’re on a community well, and along with high levels of copper in the water, there is a possibility that the ground water filling our well interacts first with the surface water above it. Since that surface water is a beautiful lake frequented by ducks and other animals, we play it safe. We’ve had our filter for about 6 years, and haven’t had to replace our filter elements yet, so it was worth the price. We love our filter so much, it has becomes a sort of shrine to clean water, adorned with beaded offerings from the kids.

Our Beloved Big Berkey

We filled our water filter twice today, once at the beginning of the day, and once in the evening. We flushed the toilet 5 times for 3 people, and we calculated our water consumption online. I had a bit of trouble with the online calculator as I’m not in the habit of tracking our food consumption in kilos; like most people who’ve been educated in the U.S., I am impaired when it comes to the metric system. I’m also not sure if there is a significant difference in water used for standard USA feedlot beef vs. open-range grass-fed beef, or a difference between eggs from chickens in battery farms and my backyard hens; it would be interesting to know. I may have guessed too low on our grain, vegetable, and fruit consumption, but according to the water calculator, we could make the biggest dent in our water use by reducing our coffee and tea intake and the amount of meat we eat. That makes sense to me.

I’m not sure I’m willing to give up coffee and tea completely, and we won’t be giving up our favorite beef for now, either. Perhaps by reducing our water use elsewhere (say, by not using the garden hose to spray the decks off any more), I can compensate a tiny bit for the higher water and carbon footprints of our vices.

I think I’ve discovered the silver lining to my slovenly housekeeping habits. Because I’m too lazy to take care of our laundry and dirty dishes each and every day, I always have enough dirty dishes to fill the dishwasher, and enough dirty clothes for full loads in the washing machine. This delay between loads of wash means we wear our clothes until they’re truly dirty (although that doesn’t take all that long given the fun my kids have with mud, sap, and chickens) because those are the only available clothes. I’ve been in the habit of using only just enough detergent since I washed our own cloth diapers for my kids and quickly learned just how little detergent we could get by on; build-up of excess detergent really does mean dirtier, smellier diapers and clothes. My Google search results tell me these things help lower our water footprint, although I started doing them for the sake of frugality and diapers that didn’t stink.

At the top of my water wish list are rainwater barrels to catch the runoff from our roof. I see beautiful ones made from recycled olive barrels at the garden supply stores here, but they’re just too expensive for me. I’m going to make this my spring project – Surely there is a way to make my own, some elegant and simple solution that I can put together from found objects, something safe (no way for my kids or animals to fall in) and functional (a spigot to attach a hose would be lovely). It seems crazy not to capture some of this amazing excess of water that falls down on us for 9 months each year

No Impact Experiment: Abe Lincoln, Hankies, and A Travel Mug

Abe Lincoln Beard & Zero Waste Hankie

We have been using toilet paper instead of official tissues for our tears and runny noses for years, but I was motivated to kick that habit this week. One of my zero waste local heroes mentioned the other day that she had just cut up a t-shirt to make herself a soft handkerchief to help deal with her head cold…As soon as I hung up the phone, my kids and I rummaged around to find our own suitable t-shirt, which we cut up with a dull pair of old pinking shears from a garage sale. Voila, new black hankies for each of us, enough for multiple pockets and backpacks and under our pillows. Also, as shown here by A, they double nicely as beards whenever you want to become Abe Lincoln:

Miss M the Rabbit and her hot chocolate jar

This morning, I needed to join a meeting in town and since M is out of preschool for the day, she got to come along for the ride. I usually sweeten the deal by buying her a cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, something she never gets at home (whipped cream would only make her dairy-free sister painfully envious). I have my own metal to-go mug that I haul around town, but we don’t have any kid sized travel mugs. What to do, what to do…M selected a marmalade jar that felt good in her hands and I made a cover for it from the sleeve of a felted wool sweater. This was easier than it might sound thanks to the bag of felted wool scraps I got from someone more crafty than myself via my local Freecycle network. I cut the end of a sleeve off, slid it over the jar, and we were ready to give it a try.

We had one near miss when the jar almost slipped out of its wool protector, but we managed to get home without leaving a trail of broken glass and lukewarm chocolate milk behind us. I need to work out the kinks on this, but I think I can find a way to make some sturdy travel mugs for my kids using what I’ve got on hand at home. Major bonus: The lid for the marmalade jar screws on tightly, so we had zero spills on the trip from coffee shop to car to house. It’s not at all No Impact to get hot chocolate from a coffee shop that I’ve driven my car to, but at least we didn’t use a “disposable” cup or generate any new plastic waste.

No Impact Experiment: Gratitude, the Electrical Edition

gratitude: lights, books, heat

Here’s what I’m grateful for tonight. Now to find ways to keep these things in my life with smaller footprints:

• Light. Sunlight, candlelight, bulbs incandescent/compact fluorescent/LED, flashlights, oil lamps, moonlight, I’m not picky, I love it all*. Just one small candle in a jar can turn my living room from deserted house to home.
• Heat. I’ve been thinking all week about people who are truly freezing to death, about the mothers whose children won’t make it through this winter because of cold. I am grateful for heat, and wish we all had the luxury of working to lower the carbon footprint of our heat sources; heat shouldn’t be a life or death matter.
• Music. There’s nothing like music to banish my grouchy self.
• Books. So grateful we are fortunate to settle in next to a light, under our layers of clothing, blankets and dogs, to read, read, read.
• Hot tea. Caffeinated or herbal, tart or sweet, milky or straight, just so long as it’s hot.

*Well, OK, maybe I really don’t love compact fluorescent light, but I’m willing to say it’s better than constant darkness.

No Impact Experiment, Day 5: Energy. Confessions of a Carbon Glutton.

Right, it’s Energy Day. As I am just now warming up after being off the power grid thanks to that one storm in November, I wasn’t up for cutting the power to my home completely. We decided to mitigate our use instead, to see how little electricity we can get by on without endangering the contents of our fridge and freezer. I can’t afford another full replacement of contents, and I know from experience that my fridge is only good for 4-6 hours without power.

Yes, here in the land of trees and wind, we get to experience days of off-grid life – When we see the wind picking up force, we gather up our candles, matches, rechargeable flashlights, and blankets. We pull food from the fridge and start to put together a warm meal, knowing that it may be some time before we get to open the fridge again or put something warm in our bellies. Our pantry is always stocked with food that can be eaten raw, but it’s always nice to enter the days of dark and cold with a bit of extra heat in your belly. We’re lucky to be on a gravity-fed community well, so we don’t have to rush to fill our tubs with water but there are many around here who do just that, or who store water in buckets and bottles. Scraping by through a power outage isn’t the same as a sustainable off-grid lifestyle, but these frequent experiences mean that residents of this island know a thing or two about what it’s like to lower our carbon footprints this way. We know what we miss and what we don’t, what feels like necessity and what is luxury when it comes to electrical use, at least on the short-term (up to one week, not usually longer than that).

breakfast by candlelight

This morning, we ate breakfast and assembled backpacks, coats, and shoes for the trip to A’s school bus stop (we made it in time this morning, hurrah!) by candlelight. When M and I got back, we opened up our hens’ coop a bit early, then hung outside to watch them emerge into the morning’s gray gloom – It wasn’t raining, there was a warmish wind blowing, and there was a lot more light outside than in. When there was enough sunlight coming through the solid cloud layer to see without candles, we went back in to play until M had to head to preschool. I had promised her enough electrical light to see her dolls, but otherwise we left many things unplugged. One CFL light on, no music from our stereo, the thermostat set to 60 to keep the furnace from clicking on, the fridge and freezer running, and our electrical vampire appliances sucking away to power their clocks (2 clock radios, microwave, oven). The hot water heater is on; we’re doing our best to stick with cold tap water, but this time of year the cold water is truly cold and I lose my grip on things I’m hand-washing if I don’t add enough hot water to keep my fingers from going numb (I learned this the hard way a while back while washing a knife). And the computer is on, always the computer. I turn off my monitor when I walk away from my desk, but my aged computer takes about 10 minutes to turn itself on and work out its startup kinks, and those 10 minutes add up quickly to take away my 2 hours of work time. I did unplug the stereo, coffee maker, tv/vcr/dvd, but that’s got to be less than a baby’s footprint in carbon savings.

Yes, I am an energy glutton. My house is designed to suck away at power so quietly, it’s easy easy easy to ignore the kilowatt-hours adding up. We had an energy audit about a month ago, through a local program working to keep our island’s usage below the power company’s allowed peak, in the hope of keeping a new substation from being built here. We switched out all of our eligible incandescent bulbs except for 3 for CFLs, we turned our thermostat’s default setting to 55 degrees, and I’m working on padded curtains for our windows. I wish I felt better about these changes, but I must say, the energy glutton in me is not at all happy. I despise the CFL bulbs. When I look at incandescent light, the words that come to mind are things like “cozy”, “warm”, “glow”, “home”. When I stand under the CFL lights in my home now, I think “anemic”, “cadaverous”, “sickly”, “deadening”, “depressing”. On the plus side, this has had the added carbon bonus of cutting my use of our light fixtures even more – I so hate the quality of the CFL light, I will squint at my books, my computer screen, my knitting, I will bump into furniture, it all seems a better price to pay than to turn the CFL bulbs on and get to work in light that makes me so very grouchy. I’m not going to switch back to incandescent bulbs, but I’m not quite ready to quit my complaining about these CFLS yet, either.

I’m not happy about the padded window curtain idea, either. There is not a lot of light here during the winter months, and I feel my body chemistry get all sludgy starting in late September every year. The idea of sitting in my house, working away under a CFL while all natural light is obliterated by thick, cushioning, insulating curtains fills me with more grouchiness. There’s no getting around the fact that our windows are cooling our house, making me reach to bump the thermostat and my carbon use up, but I need that natural light.

As much as I need the light, I need heat. Unfortunately, our house is heated by an electric forced air furnace and our registers are all in the ceiling of our single-story house. We don’t have a wood or propane stove, which are the most common alternate heat sources around here. So we use a lot of electricity to make heat that comes out and stays put, up above our head. The top of the bunk bed is the only truly warm spot in the house, so we dress in layers and wear thick socks 24/7 for 9 months out of the year. I discovered a lovely alternate source of heat during our last power outage, when it was 18 degrees F outside and only just above freezing inside. Small dogs make wonderful portable heaters, although I’m not sure what their carbon footprint is.

our alternate heat source

For a little while in the 90′s, I was a liveaboard on a 30′ wooden ketch named Libby. Libby could be hooked to shore power, but more often we read by oil lamps, cozy in the waves from our kerosene heater, food chilled in our ice box or on the decks before it was cooked on our gas stove/oven. Town was a bike ride away, so it was easy to buy groceries daily to balance our lack of refrigeration. We used plenty of petroleum products, but still far less than what would have come an apartment on land with the same small square footage. Living aboard Libby had its drawbacks – No running hot water, no toilet, shower, or bathtub, rust stains on all of my clothing – But nothing tipped the balance to make me grumpy; I loved living like that. I know first hand that there are ways to live with less electricity, let alone with greener electricity, we just need to get busy with the reverse-engineering to make our already-built land-based homes more habitable and less gluttonous without the grouch factor.

Libby

OK, enough grousing. I do have one new discovery from our Energy Day so far that makes me happy. We have a plastic dinosaur in our toy animal basket, and I recently found this ghostly T-Rex lying on the floor. I picked her up and put her on the cabinet at the end of our hallway, then promptly forgot about her. Instead of joining her friends in the basket, she’s been sitting on that cabinet for days, soaking up light. It turns out that she’s a glow-in-the-dark plastic dinosaur, just the sort of toy that gets my anti-plastic self all fired up. Last night when I stumbled along the hallway to let the dogs out, there was a happy glowing dino lighting my way. She’s not powerful enough to use as a torch, but she’s just right to keep me oriented in the otherwise dark house, enough so that I can now let the dogs out at midnight without banging into anything. This is a new one for me, but I’m very excited about this plastic toy, and grateful for my own lax housekeeping that led me to discover her undoubtedly toxic but very useful light. Here’s to more surprising solutions.

dino night light

Less thrilling than my new night light, but still pretty nifty is my discovery that I can light my kitchen adequately with a short strand of LED fairy lights. I’m not a fan of the chilly quality of clear LED bulbs, even the ones labeled “warm white”, so I’ve covered each of the tiny bulbs with the husk of a tomatillo from my garden. Voila, a mellow light strong enough for simple kitchen work!

tomatillo fairy lights

I also have a new fantasy. I’d love to see my community adopt a Year of the Rooster. For one year, I’d love to see us all unplug our alarm clocks and share neighborhood roosters instead. Imagine how lovely life would be if we all had permission to wake with the sun, then get to work. Our electrical use would go down, and I think our productivity would be at least what it is now; the shorter days of winter would be balanced by our wonderful summer evenings, and I’m sure we’d all be much happier. Anyone want to join me?