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By MaryHelen Swanson
All this talk about going green, nothing new to me. In the late 60s, my husband and I packed up the Chevy station wagon and moved to Rush City. It was our own 32-acre piece of God’s great earth. We were “back to the land,” as they said. I stayed at home with the kids and became the “farmer” on that acreage, while hubby actually made money at a job in the cities.
I was efficient, oh so efficient. With a subscription to Mother Earth News, a bright, shiny new milking pail and a one-legged stool, I set about to go green before going green was the rage. Actually, getting back to our roots was the rage and that’s why there was the exodus from the cities to the East Central communities in the late 60s and early 70s.
So I became a mama who could milk a cow by hand, churns up a batch of fresh cream butter, and bake up a week’s supply of bread.
And I learned to make do, recycle and conserve. These are some of the lessons that made me the greenest of the green.
I learned how a green mama can recycle old corduroy slacks by making strips from the legs and then braiding them into a rug. It was a sturdy, colorful creation, too.
A green mama plants four 50-foot rows of green and wax beans, clears the rows with a metal wheeled, antique cultivator, waters and weeds and waits for the crops to appear, takes the baby and secures her in a safe playpen at garden’s edge, lays a full-size blanket on the ground and picks beans until she’s blue in the face (er, that should be green, right?). She fills the blanket and creates a mountain of green bean goodness a foot and a half high. At the same time, she is keeping an eye on baby and her older siblings while they work in their own gardens they have grown from the 1 cent kids’ packet ordered from Guerney’s catalog along with the $50 worth of seeds for mama’s home-grown garden.
A green mama then takes baby, playpen, and, (grasping the four corners of the bean-laden blanket) the produce in the house.
Then that green mama puts the youngster down for a nap, calls the older girls in to take a break and read a book, no television, and commences to clean, cut and freeze the myriad of green beans in the blanket so she can give her family healthy food in the coming winter.
A green mama sends the kids out with every last bit of food scraps to toss on the “compost pile,” compost pile being one of the more familiar phrases around the house.
A green mama gets a pattern and makes the girls’ Cabbage Patch doll look-alikes, using remnants of cloth from the dresses and pajamas she sewed for her kids.
And a green mama shovels that green stuff that comes out the other end of the cow after that cow, also a green mama, consumes a ton of green grass.
So, as Mother’s Day approaches, get out your crayons, made of melted crayon pieces, of course, and homemade paper and create a most magnificent green card for that woman who comforted you when you turned green after eating all those sweet pea pods in that green, green garden.
Oh, just have a nice day moms.
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