Growing up, we always used to make fun of my grandmother at Christmas and birthdays when she would carefully open the presents so as not to rip the wrapping paper. She would smile, undeterred by our teasing, and slowly undo the tape so that she could use the wrapping paper again next year. As my mother told me once, “Grammy pioneered ‘living green’ long before it became the cool thing to do.” She reduced, reused, and recycled long before that phrase was even coined. She would mend pantyhose that had a run, reuse old tins and boxes, and recycle all organic matter in her compost pile.
She even had a dresser drawer dedicated to us grandchildren that she filled with odds and ends that she didn’t want to throw away but couldn’t find use for. Each visit to her house, my brother and I would eagerly anticipate the new treasures we would surely find in the drawer.
Often, her efforts to live frugally were met with protest by those of our younger generation. “Why don’t you get an electric mower?” we would ask Grammy as she pushed the old squeaky manual mower around the yard. “Why do you save everything??” my mother would question her as we tried to clean out things from her attic that hadn’t been touched in years. “Isn’t this scrap paper from something you cut up in 1917?” we would joke.
Now, years later, as I try and orchestrate a family budget for my household that in addition to me and my husband now includes a new baby and several pets, I find myself reflecting back on everything that my Grammy did to live frugally. I now see the wisdom in everything she did and have adopted many of her methods of reducing, reusing and recycling as my own. I have been reusing paper and plastic bags instead of throwing them away, using vinegar to clean my house, using cloth diapers for my kids, and recycling every morsel of trash that I can. I have started a compost pile and have seen what it can do for my garden plants. I find satisfaction in doing my part to help the environment, even if it is only a little bit.
But just as I start to feel proud of myself for all of these efforts in ‘living green,’ as they say, I think back to Grammy and how effortlessly she lived her life ‘green’ and how my efforts pale in comparison to hers. Not only that, but I admire her cheerful demeanor as she went about doing all of these daily tasks. I’m so thankful for Grammy’s example that she set for me just by how she lived her life.
Malcolm Gladwell once stated that, “We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.” Oh, how this is true! Had my Grammy simply preached “waste not, want not” instead of quietly living her life by example, it very well could have gone in one ear and out the other.
I probably won’t be able to adequately verbalize my gratitude and admiration to my Grammy, but I hope that by attempting to live my life in a way that does her honor, she will live on within me. Every time I take the recycling bin to the curb or clip coupons from the Sunday newspaper, I am reminded of her.
And this past Christmas I smiled to myself as I opened a gift – and carefully slid my finger under the flap to undo the tape so that I could save the paper for next year.
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