Month: March 2024

Back in the nineteen nineties, which seem like yesterday and decades ago all at once, a teacher friend warned me about climate change. She was a generally quiet and low key individual so her emotional description of what was coming if we did not change our ways caught my attention even as I silently felt that she was in the throes of an emotional outburst. Contemporaneously one of my sons-in-law began beating the drum of  impending danger with regard to climate as well. Because I was still quite busy with caring for my family and advancing in my career I found such information to be interesting but hardly life changing. Like most people I ignored the signs and kept moving forward with my life. Somehow I did not feel the least bit responsible for the strange weather patterns that seemed to be just another quirk of nature. 

A few years back one of my grandsons who is quite bright and earnest began informing us of his views on what was happening on the earth. He spent much time researching climate and the human impact on it, becoming more and more convinced that natural disasters would be more and more frequent and consequential. He worried that if we did not plan immediately we would one day be caught in a worldwide migration to places that were more comparable with human survival. He spoke of purchasing land in a part of the world that might suffer less than others when the worst began to happen. He felt that having members of of the family live near one another would provide a variety of skills that might become necessary as society broke down. It all sounded a bit like a dystopian science fiction thriller except for the fact that my grandson provided actual facts and showed us trends that were disturbing. Since then I have seen terrible incidents occurring all over the globe.

I have witnessed first hand the changing nature of the seasons. I remember February as a time that was cold day after day even in a southern place like Houston, Texas. As a young girl I walked to school in the proverbial days of freezing. We rarely had snow but winter meant bundling up in heavy coats, wearing hats that covered my ears and donning gloves to keep my hands from becoming too cold. We turned on the heater in our home in November and our Christmases were mostly cold. From January through February we knew that winter was a certainty that sometimes even included snow. 

These days I hardly ever have to use my winter gear beyond a few days here and there. This past February felt more like spring on most days rather than the traditionally coldest month of the year it had been in my youth. We had to cover our plants once this year but mostly spring arrived earlier than ever. The changes are more and more noticeable and I often think of the science minded people who were so insistent that we all had to do something to stem the tide of the damage that had already been done to our earth. 

Over fifty years ago Exxon enlisted the expertise of notable scientists to determine the effect of fossil fuels on our planet. The details that emerged from the research predicted with certainty much of what is happening today, but the mega company chose to fire the researchers and hide the report when they might have been pioneers in changing the way we all live. They literally chose instead to launch a campaign of disinformation that lied about the impact that we humans have on the natural world around us. Those who were like my friend, son-in-law and grandson were made to seem foolish and perhaps a bit hysterical. We all went on ignorantly unaware of the monster at the door.

As I watch millions of acres burning out of control in my home state of Texas I feel regret that I did not pay more attention to the warnings that should have been apparent to anyone with a willingness to consider the evidence. We humans were slowing making our beautiful earth more and more sick. It was so much easier to look away and assume that we would be able to fix any problems with our human ingenuity when the time came to finally react. Sadly, we may have gone too far in our profligate ways to prevent great loss and suffering as dangerous weather events become more and more of a reality. Perhaps we would have been better served to listen to those whose only interest in predicting what might happen had been to help us all. 

The evidence of climate change is all around us and yet it is not the big issue that it should be. If we are worried about human migrations now, we should be even more concerned about how they will look if vast areas of land become uninhabitable. We must understand that sources of water are drying up, making human life in the places they serve less and less likely to be sustained. It is possible that in the coming decades we humans will witness changing dynamics in where and how we are able to exist.

Surely the issues surrounding climate change should be paramount in determining how we live from day to day and whom we choose as our political leaders. Other countries are actively preparing for the difficulties to come while we Americans are mostly stagnant in our efforts. A wave of anti-scientific thinking will be our destruction if we do not join together now to protect our world from ignorance. We can no longer push away the scientific experts and hide the evidence in a vault pretending that all is well. We are in a race against time that should have begun more than fifty years ago. The question is whether or not we are willing to attempt to catch up to where we need to be or if we will wait until disaster is our everyday reality. The fires are burning and we have to do more than just put them out. Will we wake up before it is too late?

Both of my grandmothers always looked old to me. In truth they were only in their sixties when I first remember them but they seemed ancient with their nonchalance about appearances. I sometimes wonder of they were more comfortable with aging than most of us are today. They allowed all of the signs of growing old shine forth without any attempts to mask them with makeup or hair dye or injections of botox. They accepted that they were in the last phase of life with great dignity and little worry about how they might appear to the world. 

Both ladies mostly wore cotton dresses that were fitted at the waist revealing any bulges of extra weight that they might have had. The frocks were comfortable but without much style. The cloth was often patterned with flowers or plaids that did little to differentiate them from a thousand other older women. They were strictly utilitarian and often a bit faded and frayed after much use. Their closets generally held just enough dresses to get them from one wash day to the next. 

My grandmother Minnie Bell worked on a farm so her wardrobe also included overalls and work shirts which she donned to labor in the fields of vegetables that she tended. She nonetheless always changed back into one of her dresses once the outdoor work was done. She dressed as though she had been assigned a set of uniforms to wear each day of the week depending on what duties she was performing. Her shoes were sensible and comfortable. After all she would work in them from before sunrise to late in the night. 

My Grandma Ulrich rarely wore shoes. Instead she padded around her home in her bare feet unless it was a cold day in winter. Then she donned slippers lined with soft fabric to keep warm. I don’t think I ever once saw her wearing a regular pair of shoes. I’m not even sure that she owned a pair. 

Neither of my grandmothers wore makeup or spent much time styling their hair. One let her hair grow long so that she might braid it and allow it to trail down her back. The other grandmother kept her hair cut short and curled into a wavy bob. In my youth it seemed to me as though there was a kind of official agreement among women over sixty to spend little time primping and fussing over appearance. They enjoyed a kind of mutually agreed upon comfort that allowed them to focus on other things than the wrinkles on their faces or the widening of their waists. They let their graying hair be a kind of badge of glory that spoke of their wisdom and joy in being themselves. 

I always thought that both of my grandmothers were beautiful. I did not expect them to look younger than they actually were or to be fashion icons emulating current trends. They left styling to the younger generation and focused outwardly toward the people in their lives. Their daily routines were designed to make everyone around them feel safe, satisfied and loved. If they worried about their physical appearance they never gave any indication of their concerns. They reveled in being mature versions of themselves, sweet matriarchs striving to demonstrate how much their families meant to them. 

In today’s world there is so much pressure on women to continue looking as young as possible even as they age. Our society has an obsession with youthfulness that is so influential that even young girls take note of a stray gray hair or a tiny crease in the skin around the eyes. Women spend time slathering themselves with creams and and skin products designed to imitate the youthful glow of a teenager. They fuss over their clothes and shoes hoping to present an image of being eternally young. It is an exhausting and time consuming process that begins with peer pressure on teens and never seems to abate until they revolt and choose clothing and shoes for comfort rather than style. 

I suppose that there is no reason to appear dowdy or older than we actually are. Nonetheless there is an argument to be made that we should consider how much time and money it is taking to keep ourselves looking as young as possible. We might ask ourselves when it will be okay to simply relax like my grandmothers did. There should come a time when we just allow our inner beauty to be what people see instead of supporting the billion dollar businesses convincing us that it is important to improve ourselves with their products. I know that I am probably just as guilty of this as anyone else who attempts to artificially cover the signs of aging. 

The times of isolation during the pandemic were often difficult, but also freeing. I became like my grandmothers in so many ways. I had a repertoire of seven different iterations of jeans and t-shirts that I combined and repeated day after day. I let my hair grow and removed the polish on my fingers and toes. Like Grandma Ulrich I mostly operated in my bare feet and when I needed shoes my go to choice was usually to wear slippers. I washed and moisturized my face but let dust cover the cosmetics that I had always used to paint rosy cheeks on my face. I was comfortable and happy and more in tune with the rhythm of the world. All of the superficialities melted away because I did not need them. It was a gloriously liberating time that now allows me to feel comfortable being my natural self on most days. I only go into full fashion mode for special occasions now.

A friend recently spoke of how wonderful it is to grow old gracefully. It is extraordinary when we can look at ourselves in the mirror with nothing more that what nature has given us and feel content with what we see. Reaching that point frees us to look outward and discover that the best feelings come from spending most of our time embracing and comforting others. There is so much joy in seeing the world without efforts to change or conform to artificial pressures. Our grandmothers seemed to know that. Perhaps we should follow their example. After all when we remember them we see that they really were beautiful.