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In a recent post on this blog, I talked about the importance of knowing what we have, having it in appropriate quantity, and remembering where it is stored. (In permaculture design, this principle is called “Stocking.”) In an affluent society, where people readily accumulate “stuff” even without trying, even in fact when outright RESISTING, that becomes a challenging task.

My inheritance of thread, needles, fabric now spans four generations of women. We were a long line of seamstresses, quilters, knitters, crocheters.

Of course, even if we remember what we have, we may possess it in excess quantity such that it succumbs to damage or decay before getting used up. That’s what seems to have happened to the 10 little spools of silk darning-thread in this tiny slim cardboard box that I discovered within a large Container Store box of thread I inherited from my Mom. The thread breaks readily with a tug of the hand. It can be hard to know in advance how much of something we’ll need, and erring on the side of excess may be human nature, especially if you’ve known times of scarcity or carry them in your ancestral memory. (Which, hey, is probably all of us to a degree.)

I have captured its beauty just now in photos (which you can see in this post on my Deep Green Facebook page ), and also have honored its creation by looking up the name of the mill on the box. The Heminway & Bartlett Silk Mfg. Co., Watertown, Connecticut.

And, although it might seem sad, I am now going to compost the box of thread. The entire box and its contents are returnable to Mother Earth without harm, and there’s actually great dignity and beauty to that. I wish we would be quick to return to old packaging methods like this. (Update: The little box of old silk thread fits into my newly organized thread-box without a squeeze, so I’m keeping it for now; it is just so charming.)

My online search yielded a website dedicated to old mills in Connecticut! For each mill, it gives historic information as well as any current purposes the old mill building is being used for. Apparently part of “my” mill is now being used as a day spa!

H&B was a silk-thread mill founded in the 1880s. And apparently it did not close til the early 2000s. Here is the “old mills” website, open to H&B’s page.

Many times (in this blog, and out and about in the world) I get started on a topic, only to find it doesn’t tie up neatly. I keep finding other threads of connection.

My maternal grandfather owned a knitting mill in Fall River, Massachusetts. (He also had a career as an efficiency consultant for factories and other companies. He was an engineer, educated at MIT.)

My maternal grandmother could knit and read at the same time, she was that good. My maternal grandparents were of English and Scottish descent and I believe though don’t know for sure that the ancestors from that side came over in the 1700s. There were some French Huguenots in the mix also.

On my Dad’s side, both my grandmother and my grandfather worked at a sewing factory. GenTex Corp., in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. (Grandpa was also the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in the hamlet of Simpson PA.) The ancestors on that side of my family came over from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. They spoke a language that wasn’t pure Polish but I believe most of them identified as Polish. The women on that side of the family were geniuses with a needle and thread; the men were virtuoso carpenters.

Some of this information might be wrong. Pretty much everyone in the generation before ours is gone now though, so things are hard to check. It’s one thing I regret: not having been more of a student of my ancestry. Not that it’s easy in this modern bleached-white culture, but many people do have knowledge of those ancestral threads. Losing our ancestral connections is an extremely unmooring sensation.

In school, my favorite-favorite subjects were Art and Home Ec. But I had a hard time admitting that to myself because, in “book-smart” circles, those were considered classes for “dumb people,” and if you were book-smart you were expected to aim higher, go to college. Quite honestly, I struggled with most academic subjects, once they expected you to get your nose out of the book and actually put pen to paper; dissect and analyze; make pronouncements. But I was raised in a privileged environment (where I was led to believe I was “academically gifted,” despite the fact that my work in academic subjects was only ever mediocre at best, aside from a seemingly natural affinity for learning languages), so not only did I get into college; I actually made it through college (by the skin of my teeth, though I’m not sure anyone, even my own parents, knew how thin a skin that was). I didn’t even know being a seamstress could be a serious thing.

No regrets about my path; it’s a rich tapestry of many colors and textures. My only regret would be that I may have taken someone else’s spot in college (or later, in office jobs) who deserved it more. Anyway, whether or not that actually happened, I am privileged, and as such I owe it to my ancestors, to my living family members, to my community, and to society as a whole to use my privilege in service of the greater good.

The box of thread I’m sorting and organizing now is a clear plastic rectangle-cube about a foot wide, a foot and a half long, and six inches deep. It contains countless spools of thread, still good, in a full range of colors. The contents of this box are only a tiny fraction of my thread stash (let alone my stash of embroidery flosses). Somehow even just sitting still in the box, the spools have become unspooled, and threads tangled. Just now I wound them all up. A satisfying outcome if you’re obsessive like me.

I’m thinking of putting a post on NextDoor just to let people know they should talk to me before even thinking about buying thread. Or seam-binding. Or — great gods and little fishhooks (a favorite expression of my grandfather’s who owned the knitting mill) — zippers. So many zippers, of all possible colors and I mean all possible colors, still in their original packaging.

For some years now, my general policy on travel has been: Minimize unnecessary trips. Avoid flying. Don’t accept car rides that are out of someone’s way. Get around in town mainly by bicycle, foot, or bus. Get around long-distance mainly by Greyhound or Amtrak.

I did travel a lot when I was younger, including long-distance car trips and airplane travel. Awhile back I actually purchased carbon offsets to mitigate every flight I could remember taking in my adult life. And air travel post-9/11 has become such an unpleasant experience that I have little trouble resisting it. (And that was before Covid!) Unless one of my siblings (brother, sister, brother-in-law) or nieces needed me for something, you couldn’t pay me to get on a plane right now. I have on a couple of occasions rented cars to get to my family who live several states away.

Now, with Covid continuing, but some people wanting to get back to normal social gatherings, I started formulating some updates to my travel policy: No long-distance travel except for emergencies. If I want to visit my family, I might have to rent a van and quarantine in their yard. I will travel by bus or train again when buses and trains become open-air! (You know, like that Durango-to-Silverton excursion train.) Get around town only by bicycle or foot.

I may have to bend these guidelines at some point but for now they feel good. I’ve actually been doing a lot more walking since the pandemic hit.

Oh and here’s my ideal travel method: foot or bicycle, long-distance, by paved interstate paths dotted with camping oases. THAT is some travel I could really get excited about! It would take me about 6 days to reach my siblings by bicycle, but it’d be a fun journey. Can you imagine? Sort of like an interstate highway with truck stops, but for cyclists and pedestrians.

By the way, in a previous post I referred to myself as a “Doomer Lite.” One example: Not enough of a doomer to stockpile generators and MREs, but enough of a doomer to be aware of how many days it would take me to walk to my family if TSHTF and the world were to, like, suddenly run out of gasoline. I could cover the distance on foot in 30 days or less. Which is better than when I lived in Texas; that trip would’ve taken a good two months or more on foot.

But this train of thought is too Doomer-ish for me. Really I just want paved interstate hike/bikeways dotted with campsites right now, because it would make travel ever so much more fun, convenient, and rich.

Back in 2007, I took a solo bicycle ride from Austin to New Mexico. I rode for six days, camping just by the roadside wherever. It was a great experience but would have been even better if there were dedicated walk/bike lanes, and officially permitted campsites.

“Food justice activist Karen Washington wants us to move away from the term ‘food desert’, which doesn’t take into account the systemic racism permeating America’s food system,” and instead use the term food apartheid, “‘which brings us to the more important question: what are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?'” Food apartheid: the root of the problem with America’s groceries, by Anna Brones in The Guardian. “In my neighborhood, there is a fast-food restaurant on every block, from Wendy’s to Kentucky Fried Chicken to Popeye’s to Little Caesar’s Pizza. Now drugstores are popping up on every corner, too. So you have the fast-food restaurants that of course cause the diet-related diseases, and you have the pharmaceutical companies there to fix it. They go hand in hand. The fact is, if you do prevention, someone is going to lose money. If you give people access to really good food and a living-wage job, someone is going to lose money.” “Why don’t people with capital come into my neighborhood and think about investing in the people who already live here? Give them the capital, give them the means of financial literacy, teach them how to invest, teach them how to own homes, teach them how to own businesses.” (Visit the link to read the full interview with Ms. Washington.)

How To Fight Food Apartheid — How To Grow Change through Black-led Agriculture: An Interview with Leah Penniman, by Adina Steiman in Food & Wine. “It’s so powerful, and this is something I had to learn as an adult because it certainly wasn’t taught, but pretty much anything you can think of that we cherish in organic and regenerative agriculture from raised beds to compost to polycultures, you can trace back to African and African American innovation. So Cleopatra is the first person in history to have been recorded as a vermi-composter. The Obambo people of Namibia had the first raised beds. We have the 26 different polycultures in Nigeria, and that’s the basis of what a lot of people call permaculture today—these mixtures of different plants in a mutually supportive ecosystem and on and on and on.”

Farming While Black (Leah Penniman’s website and also the title of her book). “Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through innovative programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Penniman is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and end food apartheid.”

… Is the same as not having it at all. Worse, actually. Because you or I paid the money and expended the time to acquire the item. And now can’t remember where we put it.

I have just now done that with a big Tupperware container. Can’t find it for the life of me, and it’s the perfect thing to store leftover 4th of July cake. Oh well!

One of the permaculture design principles is “Stocking.” It means having the stuff you need on hand in appropriate quantities, neither too much nor too little. And remembering where it is stored.

You might find this hard to believe, but even when I was living in a 19-foot travel trailer (with all my possessions under that one roof; none in storage), I still managed to forget where I kept things. And forget entirely that I owned certain things!

Sometimes I would find an item years later, spoiled by heat or time, never having been used.

One thing I’ve found that helps is to periodically go through each cabinet or closet. Pick a different room or space each week, say, and take a couple of hours. And come to think of it, I haven’t done that lately with the kitchen cabinet where I store plastic containers for reuse. That cabinet is packed to the gills, and could be hiding an entire small family, let alone a tupperware container!

Update: I did end up finding that nice tupperware container, and that yummy leftover cake is now safely stored for maximum shelf-life. (Now to tackle my boxes of sewing supplies to see if I can find a certain piece of fabric I’ve been looking for …)

“I hope your food is growing well.” (Email from one of my doomer/prepper buddies in Texas, who grows a huge garden that would feed a platoon.)

My response to him: “Re growing food, I am terrible at gardening. I do it, just not well. In summer I mainly forage. If I can’t make myself useful enough to trade for food when push comes to shove, well hey, I’ve lived a good long life. And I know lots of ways to go that are readily at hand, and am prepared to go. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. Somehow at least one of my skills will be useful enough to trade. Not everyone can be good at everything.”

I wrote the above the day before yesterday.

Then yesterday, two different neighbor couples stopped by my driveway to say hi. They always enjoy my yard, and we always talk about plants and other good stuff.

Both couples are growing food at their places. Lots of people, actually, are growing food and doing other actions to reduce their reliance on distant, hyper-centralized, hyper-industrialized systems. We trade seeds and encouragement.

I’m not a full-on doomer or prepper. I’m more of a “doomer/prepper lite.” I think it’s wise to have a certain amount of food, water, and other basic necessities stored up for emergencies. But I’m not out to build a fortress. I firmly believe that what ultimately matters is the ability to connect with people and share resources. (Though I do have to remind myself of this at times when I panic because I don’t have that food-growing green thumb.)

Starting a bullet list here. What do people value, what are they willing (even if they have very limited income) to spend lots of their hard-earned money and time on? To me, an environmentalist seeking to popularize green living on a deep cultural level, it can feel discouraging that everyone’s willing to pay for cable TV, cruises, concert tickets, lawn-manicuring services, and other relatively expensive items, yet begrudge paying a few extra bucks to shop at a locally owned store instead of MegaLoMart. Or buy local organic produce; or grow some of their own. And why so many people (again, including people at the very low end of the income scale) are willing to pay several thousand dollars a year to own a car, but won’t pay a similar amount extra to live in an area where they can walk or bicycle to their jobs and just about everything else they need.

But instead of fighting that energy (which after all is just another force of nature like a stream or a waterfall or a breeze), we can align ourselves with it. By so doing, we can accomplish a green cultural shift naturally and with less effort.

Here’s my start on a bullet-list of things that are strongly valued by the dominant culture. Over time, as additions occur to me, I will fill this in with examples of eco activities that can feed in to each item. And possibly I will also add more list items.

• Entertainment

• Outdoor family fun

• Health, fitness

• Adventure, excitement

• Convenience

• Security

• Sex appeal

• Youthfulness

• Independence; freedom

• Stress relief

• Pets (pampering them, ensuring their safety and wellbeing)

• Write. Write down your thoughts, ideally on paper or your own website or both (as opposed to just on social media where they will vanish). The written word is great because it will sit and wait indefinitely — even across lifetimes — for its readers to arrive. Another great thing I find about writing is that it helps me unload and sort my brain regularly so I’m less tempted to talk too much, babble incoherently, interrupt people, etc. — all of which I have done on far more occasions than I care to admit.

• Don’t make people expend an inordinate amount of labor to figure out what you’re trying to say. Summarize your basic point in 1-2 simple sentences. If you are communicating via an online channel and sending links, never send what I call “naked links.” Always include 1-2 sentences in your own words summarizing what the link is about and why you are sending it to this person. If you’re not willing to take the time to do this, why should your intended recipient be willing to take the time to click on a link and wade through content that might be of no interest to them, and try to guess why you sent it?

Not trying to be harsh, but communications takes bandwidth, and I don’t just mean electronic bits and bytes; I mean human attention. With the noise-to-signal ratio at an all-time high right now, we each need to do our part to streamline our communications. If you feel passionate about something (be it a petition against sprawl development or a GoFundMe for a business you love that is about to go under), it can be hard to express yourself in words about it. It can seem easier to just send a link to someone else’s words about the subject. But slow down, take a deep breath, and take a minute to add a few of your own words; your recipients are more likely to listen and maybe share. This is one case where we can actually streamline communications by adding a few words. (Think of it as a mini cover-letter for your cause, event, etc.)

You can read Part 1 of this post here.