Thankful Reflections
I was awakened by the sigh and slight movement of Prue, my little sister, turning over in the bed. We were bunking together tonight while staying overnight at Grammy's house. She breathed out deeply. Prue is such a deep sleeper.
Looking at her little head of golden curls laying across the purple-flowered pillowcase, I just couldn't stop myself from reaching over and wrapping one of Prue's shiny ringlets around my pinky finger. Perfect fit. People did this all the time to Prue's curls. She didn't seem to mind.
Removing my pinky from the curl, I rolled over and glanced out the window. The sun wasn't up yet but the chatter of the birds in the trees on the other side of the screen was almost deafening. What on earth they could be talking about. Was each one just chattering to chatter or were these bird discussions amongst bird families? I lay there for a few minutes listening to them chirping in the early morning air, air that was otherwise silent.
By the way, I am Thankful. That's my actual name ... well, Thankful Sage is my full name. My mom named me after a little Pilgrim girl who came to America on the Mayflower. We have some family connection to one of the original families that came to America way back when. It's very cool to have my name. It's a "virtue" name, my Mom told me. Prue's name is too--Prudence.
Anyway, I couldn't stop thinking about last night's chat with Grammy, about the neighborhood, and what it was like living here in the past. As we sat rocking on the porch swing, Grammy told me what it was like many years ago when she was a little girl growing up here in this old neighborhood.
Grammy moved to this neighborhood when she was 2-years-old. She had explained that the place was one of a couple of huge subdivision towns built for returning GI's following WWII. Grammy was the last of what they called "The baby boomer" generation.
Kind of a funny name for a generation if you ask me.
She said that one man and his sons, a builder with a lot of money, had bought a whole bunch of land from the farmers in the area and built thousands of houses that all looked the same and created a town for the returning soldiers.
"It really was a wonderful thing at the time, providing houses for families that otherwise would have had none."
Originally, this town where Grammy grew up was a huge broccoli farm. The farmers sold their land and just like that, the whole farm just disappeared and became an instant neighborhood in, like, 1 year. That's how fast they built the houses.
She talked about how after the land was purchased, it was bulldozed over and then the houses were plopped in. Shrubs and trees were trucked in to "gussy" the houses up back up after all the destruction of the land.
"It was just houses as far as the eye could see," Grammy explained, "And nothing but roads between them. The place looked the same on every street and if you weren't paying attention you could get lost and many people did!"
It sounded kind of weird. I tried to imagine what that must have been like, but I couldn't.
She said the best part about living in this neighborhood during those times, was that there were tons of kids on every street to play with. Families of at least four kids were common, and almost all the mothers were at home and not working in the early years. The time eventually came when some if not all worked, and the kids were not home outside playing anymore.
Thanks to the ever-changing technology and the invention of computers, most of today's parents were working at home now, so travel was no longer necessary every single day. This really cuts back on the need for cars and fuel use and really improved home life for so many people. Before that, people were spending hours in their cars getting to and from their jobs.
Companies even have more people to pick from to hire because they hire people living all over the world.
Both my parents work from home and so do most of my friend's parents. I'm super glad about this.
Grammy spoke often of what it was like to grow up here and then return when she was old. Sometimes we would take walks through the neighborhood after supper. She once pointed out to me a large old sycamore tree that she recalled being just a sapling. "We grew up together," she said.
She reached up and touched the trees leaves tenderly in her hands, once giving a branch full of leaves a "high five", like it was her pal. She even wondered out loud a few times if the old trees remaining in this enclave remembered her as she walked under them now. Could they tell it was her, the same girl who once played under them in their leaves with her friends? She liked to touch them and even hugged them on occasion. Grammy knew about trees, all kinds of trees... knew the names of them and what leaves belonged to what tree, even once they were on the ground. She knew of the medicinal uses for each one like it was second nature.
When Grammy was a kid, she insisted to her playmates that the trees had feelings and they laughed at her for saying so.
She also said that when my Dad was little and outside playing with his friends, she would not let them hit a tree with a stick. She would run out of the house scolding the boys if she happened to hear that one of them was hurting a tree or even a shrub.
Of course, everyone knows this about trees now, but she said back then, most people only thought about themselves, they didn't really think about the other beings that shared the earth with us like people do now. They really had no idea that trees were interconnected in their roots and supported each other through diseases and even sacrificed for the others in their little family forests. The trees provide so much to people if only just with their exhales, providing the earth's oxygen every day. Every being here is necessary and has a purpose. They had no idea that disturbing an ecosystem by getting rid of one species of animal or plant could destroy the balance of nature.
I can't even imagine a world like that I am only 13 and I know these things! Things have really changed.
Looking out her window now it's hard to believe that this neighborhood could possibly look the way Grammy described it. She said back then, everyone had large plots of a green plant called grass in the front and back of their homes and that they had gasoline operated machines that were for cutting it. Gasoline? We hardly use this at all anymore. I hate the smell of it.
She said that every weekend, most people would spend half their days out on their plots of land, using these machines made to cut this grass, walking them across their patches of grass plants. The machines were noisy too. When they finished cutting, some of them would bag their grass cuttings and have the trash men take them away to the dump. I thought this was so dumb. The herd of goats at the school could have eaten so well in this community back then!
She said they also only wanted this green plant called grass on their plots surrounding their homes and would kill anything else that grew in it with a spray of poison! This also affected the small animals, insects and had almost destroyed the bee's colonies altogether! People would walk up and down the sidewalks, spraying this poison on any grass that might grow up out of a crack.
I was getting angry now, this was so stupid! Without the bees, we wouldn't even be here because we would have no food and starve! What was wrong with these people?
A small flock of chickens now takes care of the insects in our gardens. Thank goodness we got back to relying on other insects like ladybugs and the praying mantis, not to mention just plain old spending time on the garden and watching it closely, removing bad insects as they move in or using natural ways to get those invasive insects and plant diseases taken care of.
Grammy said that some people competed with one another trying to have the nicest "Lawn'', as she called it. Some had special services come in to spray chemicals out of large trucks onto their lawns to feed it, to make it prettier.
Now the front and back areas of everyone who lives here, are filled with flower gardens. They are also used for growing food and relaxing in. Having large patches of lawns was outlawed a long time ago. I wonder whose idea that was to hyper focus on one ornamental plant.
Every street here now has a bee colony located at the end of each road and we all take turns feeding the bees. We learned bee safety and how to move slowly and respect the bees in class and many of us kids were certified to be bee keepers at an early age. We take turns mixing sugar water and feeding the hives. My momma is one of the lead bee keepers for this enclave and uses the beeswax for her hand made soaps and candles and the residents use the honey for food, as medicine for healing ailments and all sorts of things. I can't even imagine that people never worried about killing their bees back then.
And why they would want this grass instead of bee balm, red clover and yellow dandelions? These plants provide so many vitamins that we need. I was shocked that people did this.
"What did they eat in their salads Grammy? "I asked.
She said," They bought most of their food at a store and as time went on, and as their jobs became more demanding, people became more reliant on the store-bought food every year. Eventually, people just stopped growing their own stuff. Food was grown in other places and was shipped in, not like now, where everyone grows food around their houses. We can step outside our door and pluck a wax bean any ole time we want in summer and into the freezer and canning shelf for winter supplies. It's a good thing that some of the old ways returned as people began to realize we were not only poisoning ourselves but the entire Earth trying to alter nature and change the way plants grow.
One terribly shocking story Grammy told me was the story about the small truck, that drove through the streets and sprayed a fog out of a sprayer out of its back. The kids who once lived here loved the fog truck and when they heard it coming, used to hurry into the streets and run behind the truck and through the fog. "It was really fun"! She told me.
That the fog was actually an insecticide that was being sprayed something called Deet, that was used to kill mosquitos. This truck sprayed these neighborhoods weekly for the summer months so that people could sit out and have their BBQs and not get bitten up by them. She said when the houses were built it disrupted the perfection of the local ecosystem and the mosquitos began taking over and overpopulating. This was really bad for any living thing she said, but nobody stopped the kids from running behind the truck because no one realized it yet. It sounded pretty stupid to me as she was telling me this. Eventually, people realized this was horrible for everything and everyone and the truck stopped coming around.
Now the yards on this street are just covered in flowers and greens. Every house has a garden, every house a rain barrel and a green roof, solar panels. From what Grammy said, everyone seemed to have a specialty in their garden too. Mrs. Paries grew spectacular Japanese eggplants and Mr. Seufers tomatoes were in great demand for sauces. We now barter our foods with each other and that way we are eating what is in season, as it was meant to be, and not relying on foods to be imported from other countries as much. This is not only better for nutrition and we're not flying and trucking foods in as much as we once were, which was not all that great for the environment either. This also stopped our involvement in the wars over gasoline as we didn't need to rely on it so much.
There was a small farm now at the end of the road that was once a school and, in the past, it was surrounded by some of that grass. Surrounding the school now are fields of com, melons and beans, you name it, we got it. If it grows in zone 4, it's growing on the property, and we have greenhouses for growing other warm summer crops during the winter. I love working in there the most in the winter. It's so warm on the inside that all of the windows are fogged up and at night, it looks like a magical place from the outside.
The 4-H club is back in every school and learning to care for these crops is a part of our school day. We get out into the sunshine run around and weed a little bit every day.
There were cows, sheep, goats, and pigs. It's called it a co-op farm and learning and caring for the animals is part of school curriculum. Whenever peoples land begins to get a little messy now, they just rent the goats or sheep from the farm to come over and trim things down.
I cannot imagine not using the land and wasting all of that precious space on grass, which doesn't even serve anyone except a grazing animal. Just to look at it? How did people ever think this was a good idea? So many nutritional and medicinal plants and animals and insects poisoned for that?? It makes my head ache thinking about it.
At night, any member of our small community is free to have dinner at the school building.
We don't just use public buildings during the day, we use them all the time, even on weekends. These days at night the school was a communal place for our small community to have dinner if you wanted too. Most nights Grammy just ate something small at her house from her garden but since we were visiting for the weekend, she thought it would be more fun for us to "mingle" with some other kids that lived around here. She was making something healthy to share with the group. Sometimes she would meet other ladies for things like needlework or for the land committee meetings.
Grammy said she signed us up for tonight's meal and there was going to be a small concert on the school stage consisting of musicians from the ''neighborhood". She had me bring my cello and made a little sign that says "Thankful" to sit in front of me as I play. The other kids will have signs too.
I keep thinking about the way the old ways of doing things had gotten lost somehow and that humans had unknowingly almost ruined it all but thank goodness humans had gotten a hold of themselves and stopped many of the things they were doing to the earth.
The autoimmune diseases have become less common and so did the cancer and Autism rates have dropped. We now have relationships with and treat with thankfulness and appreciation, all living beings again, as God intended it to be. Our animals are no longer killed in terror, they live amongst us and are treated as the precious beings that they are. I know I love our chickens like family and to think that they were once living in horrific conditions, on huge chicken farms, one on top of another in crates and cages. People had gotten so separated from the land back in those times. We still eat them but thank goodness we are taking care of them and letting them see the light of day and run freely and treasuring their sacrifice for us.
Today is nut gathering day in our community. We will walk to the woods and gather the Black Walnuts and bring them to the community center for storage and processing. How good it is to eat from our neighborhood and to know what is in our food and actually care for and have respect for the trees that are providing our foods. A few people are always in the woods clearing the brush and gathering the nuts and wood from fallen trees, to keep things clear for everyone. Grammy says she knows it's not perfect, but nothing is ever is perfect, you just have to keep working at it to make things better and as problems arise you address them. It sure sounds like a better life for everyone the way things are now compared to back then when people were, well ...., they seemed a bit crazy in my opinion.
A few small changes, inserting some old ways with the new made everything so much better. We didn't have to go back to the ice ages to live better, just re-evaluated and used common sense. We still have big farms and we still have our phones computers and yet now we understand so much better how to care for ourselves by caring for the land and every creature living in it.
I was awakened by the sigh and slight movement of Prue, my little sister, turning over in the bed. We were bunking together tonight while staying overnight at Grammy's house. She breathed out deeply. Prue is such a deep sleeper.
Looking at her little head of golden curls laying across the purple-flowered pillowcase, I just couldn't stop myself from reaching over and wrapping one of Prue's shiny ringlets around my pinky finger. Perfect fit. People did this all the time to Prue's curls. She didn't seem to mind.
Removing my pinky from the curl, I rolled over and glanced out the window. The sun wasn't up yet but the chatter of the birds in the trees on the other side of the screen was almost deafening. What on earth they could be talking about. Was each one just chattering to chatter or were these bird discussions amongst bird families? I lay there for a few minutes listening to them chirping in the early morning air, air that was otherwise silent.
By the way, I am Thankful. That's my actual name ... well, Thankful Sage is my full name. My mom named me after a little Pilgrim girl who came to America on the Mayflower. We have some family connection to one of the original families that came to America way back when. It's very cool to have my name. It's a "virtue" name, my Mom told me. Prue's name is too--Prudence.
Anyway, I couldn't stop thinking about last night's chat with Grammy, about the neighborhood, and what it was like living here in the past. As we sat rocking on the porch swing, Grammy told me what it was like many years ago when she was a little girl growing up here in this old neighborhood.
Grammy moved to this neighborhood when she was 2-years-old. She had explained that the place was one of a couple of huge subdivision towns built for returning GI's following WWII. Grammy was the last of what they called "The baby boomer" generation.
Kind of a funny name for a generation if you ask me.
She said that one man and his sons, a builder with a lot of money, had bought a whole bunch of land from the farmers in the area and built thousands of houses that all looked the same and created a town for the returning soldiers.
"It really was a wonderful thing at the time, providing houses for families that otherwise would have had none."
Originally, this town where Grammy grew up was a huge broccoli farm. The farmers sold their land and just like that, the whole farm just disappeared and became an instant neighborhood in, like, 1 year. That's how fast they built the houses.
She talked about how after the land was purchased, it was bulldozed over and then the houses were plopped in. Shrubs and trees were trucked in to "gussy" the houses up back up after all the destruction of the land.
"It was just houses as far as the eye could see," Grammy explained, "And nothing but roads between them. The place looked the same on every street and if you weren't paying attention you could get lost and many people did!"
It sounded kind of weird. I tried to imagine what that must have been like, but I couldn't.
She said the best part about living in this neighborhood during those times, was that there were tons of kids on every street to play with. Families of at least four kids were common, and almost all the mothers were at home and not working in the early years. The time eventually came when some if not all worked, and the kids were not home outside playing anymore.
Thanks to the ever-changing technology and the invention of computers, most of today's parents were working at home now, so travel was no longer necessary every single day. This really cuts back on the need for cars and fuel use and really improved home life for so many people. Before that, people were spending hours in their cars getting to and from their jobs.
Companies even have more people to pick from to hire because they hire people living all over the world.
Both my parents work from home and so do most of my friend's parents. I'm super glad about this.
Grammy spoke often of what it was like to grow up here and then return when she was old. Sometimes we would take walks through the neighborhood after supper. She once pointed out to me a large old sycamore tree that she recalled being just a sapling. "We grew up together," she said.
She reached up and touched the trees leaves tenderly in her hands, once giving a branch full of leaves a "high five", like it was her pal. She even wondered out loud a few times if the old trees remaining in this enclave remembered her as she walked under them now. Could they tell it was her, the same girl who once played under them in their leaves with her friends? She liked to touch them and even hugged them on occasion. Grammy knew about trees, all kinds of trees... knew the names of them and what leaves belonged to what tree, even once they were on the ground. She knew of the medicinal uses for each one like it was second nature.
When Grammy was a kid, she insisted to her playmates that the trees had feelings and they laughed at her for saying so.
She also said that when my Dad was little and outside playing with his friends, she would not let them hit a tree with a stick. She would run out of the house scolding the boys if she happened to hear that one of them was hurting a tree or even a shrub.
Of course, everyone knows this about trees now, but she said back then, most people only thought about themselves, they didn't really think about the other beings that shared the earth with us like people do now. They really had no idea that trees were interconnected in their roots and supported each other through diseases and even sacrificed for the others in their little family forests. The trees provide so much to people if only just with their exhales, providing the earth's oxygen every day. Every being here is necessary and has a purpose. They had no idea that disturbing an ecosystem by getting rid of one species of animal or plant could destroy the balance of nature.
I can't even imagine a world like that I am only 13 and I know these things! Things have really changed.
Looking out her window now it's hard to believe that this neighborhood could possibly look the way Grammy described it. She said back then, everyone had large plots of a green plant called grass in the front and back of their homes and that they had gasoline operated machines that were for cutting it. Gasoline? We hardly use this at all anymore. I hate the smell of it.
She said that every weekend, most people would spend half their days out on their plots of land, using these machines made to cut this grass, walking them across their patches of grass plants. The machines were noisy too. When they finished cutting, some of them would bag their grass cuttings and have the trash men take them away to the dump. I thought this was so dumb. The herd of goats at the school could have eaten so well in this community back then!
She said they also only wanted this green plant called grass on their plots surrounding their homes and would kill anything else that grew in it with a spray of poison! This also affected the small animals, insects and had almost destroyed the bee's colonies altogether! People would walk up and down the sidewalks, spraying this poison on any grass that might grow up out of a crack.
I was getting angry now, this was so stupid! Without the bees, we wouldn't even be here because we would have no food and starve! What was wrong with these people?
A small flock of chickens now takes care of the insects in our gardens. Thank goodness we got back to relying on other insects like ladybugs and the praying mantis, not to mention just plain old spending time on the garden and watching it closely, removing bad insects as they move in or using natural ways to get those invasive insects and plant diseases taken care of.
Grammy said that some people competed with one another trying to have the nicest "Lawn'', as she called it. Some had special services come in to spray chemicals out of large trucks onto their lawns to feed it, to make it prettier.
Now the front and back areas of everyone who lives here, are filled with flower gardens. They are also used for growing food and relaxing in. Having large patches of lawns was outlawed a long time ago. I wonder whose idea that was to hyper focus on one ornamental plant.
Every street here now has a bee colony located at the end of each road and we all take turns feeding the bees. We learned bee safety and how to move slowly and respect the bees in class and many of us kids were certified to be bee keepers at an early age. We take turns mixing sugar water and feeding the hives. My momma is one of the lead bee keepers for this enclave and uses the beeswax for her hand made soaps and candles and the residents use the honey for food, as medicine for healing ailments and all sorts of things. I can't even imagine that people never worried about killing their bees back then.
And why they would want this grass instead of bee balm, red clover and yellow dandelions? These plants provide so many vitamins that we need. I was shocked that people did this.
"What did they eat in their salads Grammy? "I asked.
She said," They bought most of their food at a store and as time went on, and as their jobs became more demanding, people became more reliant on the store-bought food every year. Eventually, people just stopped growing their own stuff. Food was grown in other places and was shipped in, not like now, where everyone grows food around their houses. We can step outside our door and pluck a wax bean any ole time we want in summer and into the freezer and canning shelf for winter supplies. It's a good thing that some of the old ways returned as people began to realize we were not only poisoning ourselves but the entire Earth trying to alter nature and change the way plants grow.
One terribly shocking story Grammy told me was the story about the small truck, that drove through the streets and sprayed a fog out of a sprayer out of its back. The kids who once lived here loved the fog truck and when they heard it coming, used to hurry into the streets and run behind the truck and through the fog. "It was really fun"! She told me.
That the fog was actually an insecticide that was being sprayed something called Deet, that was used to kill mosquitos. This truck sprayed these neighborhoods weekly for the summer months so that people could sit out and have their BBQs and not get bitten up by them. She said when the houses were built it disrupted the perfection of the local ecosystem and the mosquitos began taking over and overpopulating. This was really bad for any living thing she said, but nobody stopped the kids from running behind the truck because no one realized it yet. It sounded pretty stupid to me as she was telling me this. Eventually, people realized this was horrible for everything and everyone and the truck stopped coming around.
Now the yards on this street are just covered in flowers and greens. Every house has a garden, every house a rain barrel and a green roof, solar panels. From what Grammy said, everyone seemed to have a specialty in their garden too. Mrs. Paries grew spectacular Japanese eggplants and Mr. Seufers tomatoes were in great demand for sauces. We now barter our foods with each other and that way we are eating what is in season, as it was meant to be, and not relying on foods to be imported from other countries as much. This is not only better for nutrition and we're not flying and trucking foods in as much as we once were, which was not all that great for the environment either. This also stopped our involvement in the wars over gasoline as we didn't need to rely on it so much.
There was a small farm now at the end of the road that was once a school and, in the past, it was surrounded by some of that grass. Surrounding the school now are fields of com, melons and beans, you name it, we got it. If it grows in zone 4, it's growing on the property, and we have greenhouses for growing other warm summer crops during the winter. I love working in there the most in the winter. It's so warm on the inside that all of the windows are fogged up and at night, it looks like a magical place from the outside.
The 4-H club is back in every school and learning to care for these crops is a part of our school day. We get out into the sunshine run around and weed a little bit every day.
There were cows, sheep, goats, and pigs. It's called it a co-op farm and learning and caring for the animals is part of school curriculum. Whenever peoples land begins to get a little messy now, they just rent the goats or sheep from the farm to come over and trim things down.
I cannot imagine not using the land and wasting all of that precious space on grass, which doesn't even serve anyone except a grazing animal. Just to look at it? How did people ever think this was a good idea? So many nutritional and medicinal plants and animals and insects poisoned for that?? It makes my head ache thinking about it.
At night, any member of our small community is free to have dinner at the school building.
We don't just use public buildings during the day, we use them all the time, even on weekends. These days at night the school was a communal place for our small community to have dinner if you wanted too. Most nights Grammy just ate something small at her house from her garden but since we were visiting for the weekend, she thought it would be more fun for us to "mingle" with some other kids that lived around here. She was making something healthy to share with the group. Sometimes she would meet other ladies for things like needlework or for the land committee meetings.
Grammy said she signed us up for tonight's meal and there was going to be a small concert on the school stage consisting of musicians from the ''neighborhood". She had me bring my cello and made a little sign that says "Thankful" to sit in front of me as I play. The other kids will have signs too.
I keep thinking about the way the old ways of doing things had gotten lost somehow and that humans had unknowingly almost ruined it all but thank goodness humans had gotten a hold of themselves and stopped many of the things they were doing to the earth.
The autoimmune diseases have become less common and so did the cancer and Autism rates have dropped. We now have relationships with and treat with thankfulness and appreciation, all living beings again, as God intended it to be. Our animals are no longer killed in terror, they live amongst us and are treated as the precious beings that they are. I know I love our chickens like family and to think that they were once living in horrific conditions, on huge chicken farms, one on top of another in crates and cages. People had gotten so separated from the land back in those times. We still eat them but thank goodness we are taking care of them and letting them see the light of day and run freely and treasuring their sacrifice for us.
Today is nut gathering day in our community. We will walk to the woods and gather the Black Walnuts and bring them to the community center for storage and processing. How good it is to eat from our neighborhood and to know what is in our food and actually care for and have respect for the trees that are providing our foods. A few people are always in the woods clearing the brush and gathering the nuts and wood from fallen trees, to keep things clear for everyone. Grammy says she knows it's not perfect, but nothing is ever is perfect, you just have to keep working at it to make things better and as problems arise you address them. It sure sounds like a better life for everyone the way things are now compared to back then when people were, well ...., they seemed a bit crazy in my opinion.
A few small changes, inserting some old ways with the new made everything so much better. We didn't have to go back to the ice ages to live better, just re-evaluated and used common sense. We still have big farms and we still have our phones computers and yet now we understand so much better how to care for ourselves by caring for the land and every creature living in it.
