I canned ten quarts of peaches today. Not because I am or want to be Martha Stewart. Not because I have anything against the peaches you buy in cans at the local Stuff*Mart (actually, The Baby declared that she likes those better, though she has yet to taste the home-canned goods). Not because I grew my own peaches, because I didn't--my peach tree died last year after finally producing a heavy crop of almost-ripe fruit which calcified before it was time to harvest, just before all of the leaves turned a crisp peach-tree-death brown and fell to the ground.I canned ten quarts of peaches today because I like the way they look, floating around in that fragile yet sturdy transparent jar, fleshy and buoyant and preserved. I like the way they look, and I like that I like the way they look. Some people like beer. Some people like cigarettes. Some people like hunting. I like canning peaches, okay?
Yesterday, while I was picking up a few canning supplies at my local necessary evil Stuff*Mart, I dropped my hodgepodge of shopping bags onto the conveyor. The young man at the counter, always up for a bit of controversial yet lighthearted conversation, grabbed the bags with mock begrudgery and sneered, "Thanks for ruining my day."
"Ruining your day? Oh...because one of my bags is torn?"
"No," he huffed, "for using them at all."
"Well, just look at it this way; I'm helping you in the long run."
"Ha! If you really think you're powerful enough to save the planet by not using a few plastic bags..."
"A little corner of it, yes..."
"...then, Al Gore certainly has brainwashed you."
"I've never even spoken to Al Gore."
A further conversation ensued about Al Gore's electricity usage and the size of his carbon footprint.
But that's not what I was thinking about.
I was thinking about my shopping bags. I was thinking that I like them. Not because I'm an Al Gore fanatic. Not because I'm trying to save the entire world. Just because I like them. I like how useful they are. I like that my daughter used them to move to her college dorm. I like how I can throw them in the washing machine and they come out nice and clean. I like the red ones and the green ones that are stamped with the words, "Speak Softly and Carry a Bag of Books" that I bought at the Better World Books store in Goshen, Indiana, a business that collects and sells books to fund literacy initiatives worldwide, with more than two million new and used titles in stock, operating as a self-sustaining company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders. Better World offers free shipping to any location within the United States or 3.97 worldwide, and every order is shipped carbon neutral with offsets from Carbonfund.org. And while I like my shopping bags, I also like that I'm not contributing to the consumption of 500,000,000,000 (yes, that's BILLION) plastic bags per year. I don't like to see them floating around in the trees. You don't either. Even Wal*Mart doesn't like it. That's why they stopped producing those trademark blue smiley-face bags that could be easily identified on roadsides and dangling from trees everywhere and went with the more generic white bags, added trash cans to their parking lots, and introduced their own line of reusable shopping bags. Watching a sea turtle choke on that blue plastic smiley face is a PR nightmare.
I was thinking about how I stopped buying paper towels about a year ago, and how I pick up cloth napkins and hand towels from my favorite thrift store, and how the money I spend there goes to help provide basic human needs internationally while the store also does their part to help people recycle things that they might otherwise have thrown away. I was thinking about the fact that I love that thrift store so much that I drag my sorry butt out of bed three Friday mornings per month to volunteer at the cash register.
I was also thinking about the furniture in my house, how almost all of it, with some very minor exceptions, came from that thrift store, or from Freecycle, or from dumpster diving.
And I was thinking about the local farmers I support, buying produce and deliciously smoky maple syrup and vases of gladiolas from that wonderful little stand called Blessing Acres run by a hard-working Amish woman whose husband died of cancer two years ago.
I might even have had time to squeeze in a few thoughts about the lack of chemicals on my lawn, how I bend down to pop a dandelion or broadleaf plantain out of my lawn and either eat it or toss it to the sheep, or how I let the milkweed, thistle and blackberries grow to provide food for the monarchs, goldfinches and other birds. How I didn't till my garden this year, but instead heaped it with all kinds of manure, both animal and green, and spent a few more hours this summer hunched over yanking bits of purslane out of the soil and popping them into my mouth, just so I wouldn't chop up the worms I've been trying so hard to encourage to live in my garden.
Because you can have a lot of thoughts in those few seconds after someone says, "Thanks for ruining my day."
I guess I just figure that God gave me this amazing planet and all of the absolutely incredible creatures that inhabit it (yes, humans included) to enjoy and be a good steward of. The way I look at it, in relation to heaven, this big ball of dirt must be pretty small, and if I'm faithful with it, I might get something bigger some day. That'd be cool.
So, now, I probably won't save the whole planet with my canned peaches, or my cloth shopping bags, or my thrift store napkins, or the redworms in my garden. But really. What's it gonna hurt?
And besides, I *like* them.
