Sylvia's Journal

Before COVID19 (BC) my ecological footprint was rather large. Decades ago Tessa gave me a quiz and when I had answered all the questions what emerged is that in order to support my ecological footprint I needed 9 planets. I was chided for that by my daughter.  Now I’d like to believe that sustaining my life style has shrunk to less than one planet. I produce less waste and I am not driving or flying. 

It pains me that I have to throw away the colored plastic bags and elastic bands in which our newspapers are wrapped. Now they go into the toxic waste bag sitting by the front door where they join the junk mail (which seems to have diminished). I used to recycle all that.

But when it comes to food, we use more of what we buy and what we already have. We successfully made our first yogurt from powdered milk, like the olden days in Yemen. This was in the 70s when Sanaa’s ring road consisted of two rutted tracks and a stinking ditch in the middle.  The ditch was used as a garbage dump where people poured their household debris (liquids and solids). Food was bought at small stores, not self-service. There was a counter, a till, and a man who gave you what you wanted, which could only be the things on the shelves behind the counter. Yogurt was not something you bought in a store. You made it.

We follow the good example of our daughters and freeze every part of the vegetables that we don’t use in cooking. We boil the unappealing mess for hours. What’s left is called ‘garbage’ soup, a kind of fragrant compost concoction that turns out to produce the most wonderful broth. I have developed a new appreciation of our daughters who are showing us the way, in anything related to COVID19 and simple living. I suppose this means we did a good job. They now are the generation that (should) lead us – Baby boomers, step aside!

We are appreciative of all the free art forms that are now offered to anyone with a computer, electricity and good bandwidth: the museum tours, the concerts, the audiobooks from businesses that used to sell these same wares. We watched a wonderful play from the London Theatre with James Corden.  Our Quaker community organized a poetry reading via Zoom that moved us deeply. It’s funny how the always underfunded art community is coming to our rescue, to keep us, grounded and sane. If people didn’t already know this (and supported the arts), I believe this is now abundantly clear. It will be interesting to see if the debt will be repaid PC (post-COVID19).