Lest You Think I Only Obsess About Running

I obsess about many things. Case in point, this musing, crafted a couple of weeks ago.

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Partner has these two old polo shirts. Once upon a time, we tie-dyed them with pale blue circles and lines to freshen them up a bit. Very pretty. But now they’re stained up, mostly because he used them as gardening shirts. Have you ever tried to wash banana sap out of clothes? Seriously.

The integrity of the fabric is still good, and since they’re extra-large shirts, they offer up large swathes to work with. I wondered what I could do with them.

Then I read an article about Whole Foods Markets. Apparently they’re not going to use plastic grocery bags anymore, instead offering customers the choice between recycled paper bags and 99-cent canvas bags.

Idea.

I took apart a plastic grocery bag at its heat sealed seams and examined its architecture. It has a folded pleat down each side, from handle to bottom that allows the bag to be folded flat and then expand volume-wise to hold stuff.

I cut out the sleeves and the collar of one of the shirts. (I know from previous experience that I can make rather cute underwear for myself from a pair of his sleeves. And the kids love to play with the collars, so until I come up with some clever redeployment of them, into the dress-up bin they go). This left me with the front and back of the shirt. The front already bore a general resemblance to the dismantled grocery bag, so I trimmed things up, folded things just so, seamed the bottom and handle tops, and sort of hemmed the remaining exposed top edge. Voila. Free reusable grocery bag. Slightly larger than the plastic ones from our grocer and prestained.

Shirt A (still a shirt) and Shirt B (now a grocery bag) hanging in the grapefruit tree.

Frigorific

Today is my mother’s 54th birthday. I might wish her a happy birthday, but I don’t think she has internet access. And I can’t call her on the phone.

Eight years ago, my mother was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without opportunity for parole for the shooting death of my step-father. I’d really like to say that I’m making that up, but I’m not.

I don’t know what other people do in situations like this, but I’ve had a really hard time maintaining communication with my mother since her conviction.

There are pragmatic challenges. She is more than a thousand miles away from me. Prisons in the U.S. are controlled places, with all communication in and out observed and sometimes filtered. That has a chilling effect on communication all by itself.

More important though, are the emotional challenges. Like the fact that my mother—an important person in my life—was convincted of killing my step-father—another important person in my life—with a really rather pathetic tale of theft and deception as the explanation. That pretty much makes effective communication something like swimming in frozen molasses.

Open and honest communication with my mother has always been a challenge. She grew up in difficult and confused circumstances. Spending a childhood guessing and speculating about the feelings of those around her, I’m sure she found it difficult as an adult to function any other way. It’s one thing to speculate about feelings and motives; it’s another thing to take those guesses, choose the most sensational (even if it’s the least likely), and believe it as truth. To function ever after with that guess-cum-truth (truth-cum-guess?) locked in her thinking as if she had witnessed it first-hand. Such is one facet of my mother’s mental state.

If I could condemn my mother, my feelings and therefore my actions could be so much simpler. But my mother, the one I loved, is hard to condemn.

There was a time that I thought she was beautiful. I can remember her long brown hair with the silver streak that plagued her in childhood. When I was small, it was long enough for her to sit on it, and thick and silky. Most people remember her for her wicked sense of humor. She was sharp and archly funny in even the challenging situations. I’m sure it was her best coping mechanism. And she was my Mother. She cared for me when I was sick. She encouraged me and made me feel smart and pretty even when I was an awkward, spindly, little, four-eyed geek. I loved that mom.

For just today, in honor of her birthday, I wish I could set aside the death, and the lies, and the imperfections, the fickleness, the fear, the mistrust, the sadness, and the very deep pain. Today, I wish I could send a bit of love to my mom on her birthday.

As hard as she is to condemn, she is equally hard to forgive. I thought, perhaps, that as a mother myself, I might find forgiveness easier. Thought perhaps I could find some kind of empathy for her. But just the opposite is true. I find it that much harder to empathize with someone who treated her children so disproportionately. Who put her children at such risk, took so much from us, at such a tender point in some of our lives, and then raged when we all turned away in dazed confusion and grief and anger.

I’ve coped, in my own way, with the loss of my step-father. But she took away my Mother too. And that, as you can see, is still a struggle sometimes.

Supplemental Laundry Center

“Use it up. Wear it out. Make it Do. Or do without.”

I totally wish I could remember where I read this, but applause to the person who generated the phrase. At it’s heart, it’s a phrase about frugality, I think. For me, it satisfies twin drives: the desire to save my family money and the desire to save resources and be environmentally and socially responsible. Oh, I might add a third—the creativity and cleverness that is often involved in the “make it do” part.

We are a single-income family with three children under eight, so I face the challenge of this phrase every day. One step at a time, we’ve whittled down our practices to make the most of what we have. One car. One walking commuter (payroll spouse). One biking commuter (oldest kid). Nearly year-round garden. No cable or satellite television (remind me to post about this as a watershed change in our lives). Second-hand clothes that are reused and remodified until every last bit of lint is shaken out of them. Home cooking and food preservation. Compost pile. Jam-packed recycling bin. Green electric company. Just to name a few.

But I know there’s room for more changes.

We live coastal South Texas. The same climate that makes it possible to garden almost all year long, is the climate that makes August feel like sitting in a pot of boiling water. We need the heater (mainly for one chilly bedroom) here and there for a total of only a few weeks each year. There are a few weeks before and after the heat need where the house is comfortable with windows and doors open. The other six to eight months of the year, the temperature inside the house and outside challenges my body’s internal thermostat. This makes air conditioning our single biggest energy suck.

We set our thermostat high (82F usually), turn it off when we’re not at home. Employ strategic window curtaining to minimize sun-warming (an opposite strategy occurs in winter, with strategic curtain-opening to warm cool rooms). In other words, we’re trying.

With three small kids, I do one to three loads of laundry every day. I estimate that this makes laundry our second biggest energy suck. We had tried a clothesline when we first moved here three years ago. We strung a long line between two trees and hung up some stuff. We gave up after a few days because of things blowing away in the sea “breeze” (yes, I did use clothespins), a general lack of drying in the high humidity, and other life events sucking our time and energy.

I am committed now to trying again. I have a new clothesline, strung in a spot slightly more sheltered from the wind, in a cradle of fencing that will likely catch any clothes that decide to take flight. And I have a splinter-free table for the laundry basket. So, yes the SLC is just a table and a clothesline, but doesn’t it sound so fancy? ;)

I am on day five of daily hanging, and so far, I’d say my renewed committment and our slight modifications are working. The humidity does seem to prevent the clothing from drying completely most days. Seams and pockets are very resistant. One day this week, everything dried completely (I cheered and did a snoopy dance). The other days, I took things down at the end of the day and tossed them in the dryer to finish them off.

Overall I think it is going well. I’m using the dryer less than one-quarter of the time I was using it before. I look forward to the next electric bill to see what kind of an impact it will make.

Now, this is not easy. Hauling wet clothes in the basket out there is not for the faint-of-back. And the lifting and clipping is a good upper-body workout. I doubt I’ll be able to do it on sick days. And I’m curious what impact the high summer humidity will have. I wish my line were just a smidge longer. Right now, it’s a W, one line strung at angles between the house and fence. I wish I had just two more spans. One day this week, I did one load in the dryer because I ran out of room on the line.

Unintended perks: My preschoolers love to hang out under the wet laundry. It’s a fort. It’s a space ship. It’s a cool spot out of the sun. They also love to put the clothespines back in the bag. And the work of the laundry actually seems to go by faster in the morning, because I do the load and hang it up, or do one load of wash after another, without having to wait for the dryer.

And no. Not washing by hand. Not gonna do it.

Next post: Aspirations and Fear