Another goodbye

Nearly fifteen years ago, I went just to look at a litter of puppies. Cocker spaniel puppies. Of course as my mom, my younger brother, and I all trooped off my dad was there saying, "Sure. To look. That's what will happen."

One of the puppies caught me, because of course one would. As my dad well knew, there was no way we could go look at puppies without bringing one home. From that first snuggle, when she put her head on my shoulder and sighed contentedly, she was my dog and I was her person. The little black and white sweetheart came home with me that day. It was, frankly, stupid and irresponsible. If I'd truly thought it through I would have realized that my life was too chaotic for a puppy. I was twenty-one years old and had no idea what I wanted to do in the future, or where life would take me. I ended up moving several times, sometimes without being able to take her with me. My parents, who by that time loved her as much as I did, took care of her for me when I couldn't be around. Through it all, though, she's been my dog and I've been her person.

"I'm beautiful."

Over fourteen years later and bringing her into my life is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. It ranks right up there with meeting my spouse. When HusbandX and I decided to move in together, in Alaska, I told him that I would be bringing my dog up to (finally) live with me. He said okay, but I could tell that he wasn't excited about the idea. He said, several times, that he wasn't going to be responsible for her. She was my dog, not his.

And then they met. It was pretty much love at first sight. He'd been dreading a small dog with yappy tendencies and a hyperactive need to be in your face at all times. Instead, he got a laid back dog who loved walks and runs but was also content to just sit on the couch, encroaching on the space of whoever was there with her. I'm not going to lie, she could be pretty barky too, but generally for good reasons.

"Dignity. Always, dignity."

The joy she's brought to our lives is indescribable. So many of our favorite stories and moments are about or with her. There was the time she knocked down an entire pan of gingerbread and ate it, then spent the entire next day groaning and wheezing in pain. There was the time she confronted a moose outside of our dry cabin, tail wagging as she went to meet this strange new creature while I quietly had a panic attack on the front porch and tried to whisper-shout her back to safety, thinking that surely the moose would just stomp her to death. It snorted and she ran, yelping, back to safety. After that, we could always tell when there was a moose in the woods because she would run up and down the driveway barking, but never venturing close to the strange, scary beasts.

There was the Halloween that she had minor surgery and, drugged up, fell off the couch, barking strangely, as she realized trick-or-treaters were there just after they'd left. Every time someone came to the door we repeated this routine. She still insisted on getting back up on the couch. There was the time HusbandX was throwing leftover noodles to her and one got stuck to the hair on her back, so she spent 15 minutes doggedly sniffing around the kitchen looking for it, tail wagging, as we laughed until it hurt, intermittently throwing more noodles on her back. We finally had to pull them off and feed them to her because she would have looked for them forever. There was the time HusbandX took her to the groomers and asked them to shave her everywhere but keep her mutton chops. (They were glorious.)

She had a taste for cat poop, which we discovered only after we got our cat. She seemed to think he pooped out treats covered in pee-flavored sprinkles just for her. She also never seemed to want to lick anyone unless she had cat poop breath.

"You wish you could grow 'chops like these."

She has also been the best family dog we could have asked for. She knew I was pregnant the first time before I did, sitting and staring at me rather creepily until I figured out what was going on. Initially highly jealous of the baby, she settled down fairly quickly for a senior dog. I felt that it was a little unfair to throw a baby into the mix when she was so old but she took to her role as Babushka Dog amazingly well. She even challenged my mother-in-law, growling and barking fiercely, when she thought my mother-in-law had abandoned her baby somewhere. Then we put a second baby into the mix and she was nothing but protective and loving with the new little one. She snuggled the baby when the baby cried, she slept next to her whenever possible. After a bath, the dog ran around rubbing herself on the baby's stuff so that she'd smell like the baby, not herself. She let the baby tangle fingers in her hair and didn't even move when the baby flailed tiny fists at her face.

Despite more provocation than any dog should ever have to put up with, she has never snapped or growled or otherwise rebuked our kids. For the past couple of years she's had arthritis that has steadily gotten worse, to the point that we knew she was in a lot of pain even with a narcotic. Her joints have stiffened up and mobility has gotten worse. Still, she didn't utter a word of protest as a rambunctious toddler and now preschooler occasionally fell on her or dropped things on her. I've had many other dogs in my life and this one is, hands down, the best and most understanding of them all. She's earned her place in the doggy Hall of Fame.

"Dis is my baby, guys. I snuggles it."

This dog has also helped me through some of the lowest points in my life, including my dad's death. Her quiet snuggly support, her unwavering devotion and love, has been incredible. I realize that many dogs do this but, in my experience, rarely to this extent. She helped me understand empathy better simply by being herself.

Which makes it all the harder that she can't help us through this final transition, this last goodbye. The cruelest part of loving a dog is that they don't live nearly as long as we do. We've seen her aging--getting mostly blinded by cataracts, going deaf, cysts and tumors growing that hamper her movement even as arthritis makes everything more painful. It's been tough to watch. In many ways, she's handled it more gracefully than we have. For the last year HusbandX and I have watched her at various times to make sure she's still breathing. I've woken up in a panic at night thinking that I couldn't hear her breath, only calming down when she rolls over or snorts and snores. I've even wondered if she's hanging on for our sake, rather than her own. Does she feel like she's abandoning us?

She started having lots of accidents in the house this past summer and we thought that it was the protest of an old lady because so much was changing--we were going back and forth between houses and she clearly knew I was growing another baby. More chaos into an old dog's life. However, when we fully moved into our new house the accidents continued. We realized that we had to take her outside once every couple of hours or she just couldn't hold it anymore. She was trying her best. But there were clearly digestive and urinary issues she was dealing with, which were just because of age. And, she needed someone to actually carry her out because she couldn't get up and down the steps herself.

We began to prepare the Munchkin. Most of her memories of the dog involve us calling her Old Lady, so it wasn't a surprise to her when we pointed out that, yes, our dog is old for a dog. We talked about how when creatures get old they sometimes get sick, and that's what was happening to our Babushka. We even talked about death. That's been a big topic of conversation at our house this year anyway, but laying the groundwork for our kiddo to be okay with losing her dog, the one that helped her learn to walk, was as hard a conversation as any we've had with her. Her third word was "doggy", which in the beginning she mostly deployed as she was dropping food for the dog and giggling.

Still we waited. Our dog was in pain and mostly blind and mostly deaf and kind of incontinent but she wasn't sick. Was it really time? She still had a bit of that spark, those brief moments when her personality was stronger than old age and she seemed like her younger self. That means she's okay, right? Besides, we were both hoping that she would gracefully bow out on her own. Just go to sleep one night and that would be that, because the best of dogs deserves an easy and peaceful passing.

"I stepped in paint and ran all
over the porch so that you'll
always have my paw prints."

In October, she had what we think might have been a small stroke. Her head compulsively ticked to the side over and over again as we were snuggled on the couch watching "Stranger Things". She looked terrified, and so were we. However, as time went on and she showed no recurrence, we went into a holding pattern of waiting and watching. We couldn't bear to say goodbye just yet, especially when she wasn't actively sick. She was just...old. She didn't show signs of another stroke (or seizure?) but she had two long periods of illness. We almost put her down but pushed it off just long enough that she got better again. I mean, as better as an old dog can get. Her baseline was always a bit worse after.

She started refusing her arthritis medicine. It hadn't been doing much anyway other than making her sick to her stomach. Even with the medicine she'd had trouble standing up from the wood floors, and she was stiff when she did so. She could barely walk at times. She would fall over frequently, either tripping over things or just because, and she sometimes paced because she was in pain. The worst, though, was the heaviness. After her illness around New Year's, she got this heaviness when she laid down, as if she didn't want to have to get back up again. In bed she would rest on my legs and trying to move them wouldn't startle her or get the push-back she used to give, she would just be limp and heavy. She didn't care what I did to her as long as she didn't have to move herself.

"Don't worry, she won't go anywhere. I gots her."

We finally decided that her time had come. It was not an easy decision and we were (are) both conflicted about it. She has been, at various times and sometimes all at once, our nanny, our cleaning crew, our therapist, a thief, our comedian, our entertainment, our biggest source of aggravation, our comfort, and always our best friend. Contemplating ending her life felt so wrong, even for good reasons. However, her bad days had begun to outnumber the good and we couldn't ignore that. She hadn't been able to go for a walk for over a year now, and even food had lost some of its appeal. We also didn't want her to get sick again and have to do this in a hurry, or watch her waste away to a withered and wretched ending. She deserved better than that.

We gave her two last wonderful weeks, taking pictures of her with the kids and feeding her home-canned salmon with rice for dinner. We spoiled her with snuggles and back scratches. I took her to preschool pickup and let her meet all the kids, who doted on her. And during these weeks, we've been watching her, hoping that it wouldn't come to the vet visit. We were hoping she would gracefully exit on her own. With all the love and attention she actually perked up and we tried to talk ourselves out of it yet again, but holding her and feeling how bony she was let us know that we were just deluding ourselves. So I found a mobile vet who would do a house call. We wanted her where she felt most comfortable, where she could be surrounded by familiar scents and her people.

"It's okay, she can jump here
and I'll just keep napping."

Our Munchkin was treating it all as a game. "It's okay, we can get a new dog!" It was frustrating and demoralizing, even though we knew that she couldn't possibly understand. We had my younger brother come to take her to the playground before the vet got here. It took a while (the dog ended up getting the sedative dose of a 140 lb. dog, though she was only about 23 lbs at this point) so they walked around after the playground, then listened to music in his car as we said our final goodbyes.

We weren't going to let the Munchkin see the body. HusbandX had come home early from work and dug a grave in the backyard while I did preschool pickup. However, the Munchkin was insistent. We both felt that maybe it would make the whole thing seem real at last, and she would understand. As preparation I explained burial, that when a spirit is gone we return the body to the earth, and she accepted that. Then we showed her the body. "When will she wake up?" We explained that she's really gone, that what made her herself was gone, and that was when she finally got it. She wailed so loud and so hard that one of the neighbors, a dog owner also, came out to see what was up.

The Munchkin insisted that she help bury our Old Lady. I don't know if she'd ever been introduced to the idea of burial before (my dad was cremated) but she immediately understood the concept, asking for a little shovel of her own. HusbandX had put apple blossoms in the grave, and he and I lowered her down together. Then we gave the Munchkin a trowel and we grabbed our shovels and, all crying together, we buried our dog.

Of course, four-year-old spirits can't be repressed. Sobbing and wailing she was crying, "Bye-bye! Bye-bye, Pepper! I love you--waaaaaah! Oh look! It's a w-w-worm! I want to *sob sob* put it in there. Waaaaaah! Bye-bye Pepper! Daddy, *sob* aren't you going to--waaah--help?" I was both crying and laughing as we did the hard task of entombing one of the best creatures I have ever known.

I have some bricks that I was going to use to make a small flower bed, but now we're going to have the Munchkin paint a few as a grave marker. I'll plant some perennial flowers over her, so that no one can be gloomy when we look at that corner of the yard.

We'll get another dog at some point, because there's a big gaping hole in our lives now that can only be filled by a dog.  Anyone who's ever owned a dog knows there's something incredible and special. We do not deserve our dogs, creatures with the purest hearts. So we will get another dog, but we will never forget or stop missing the dog who helped us become a family.

"Later guys, it has been a wild time."

Addition from HusbandX:
Your departure has left me shattered and I can't figure out how to put myself back together. When it all started I didn't even want you, now I don't know how to continue without you.

It's not actually about the money

I have a little secret. I don't actually care about money. In fact, I hate it. Money has caused so much suffering in the world, from people literally killed over it to just the amount of stress it causes most of humanity. Money makes people greedy, and it blinds them to even the basics of being decent humans. It gives power to those who, frankly, don't deserve it. It rewards those who are the most immoral, those who are most willing to trade or do just about anything to get more money.

So why do I write about money, if I hate it so much? What actually motivates me? The simple answer is that in most cases, frugality is environmentalism. There's such a huge intersection between the two. However, the minute you start talking about the environment many people's eyes glaze over and their minds start wandering. No one wants to hear a self-righteous rant about how much good you're doing in the world. And frankly, I know I'm not doing a ton of good. I would never label myself an environmentalist because I suck. I and my family take a huge number of resources. We are by no means kind to the earth, in part because we have to exist within the framework of our society. A society dominated by the pursuit of money.

Even if I lived a truly environmentally friendly life, if I did everything right, there's still the fact that society at large doesn't seem to be changing any time soon. I understand that too. However, the fact that it is collective action that will make a difference gives me hope. Every person who starts making a difference impacts those around them and the difference spreads. If no one speaks out, then no one is working to make a difference. Do you want to live in the sort of society where no one is trying to make change for the better? Neither do I.

So here's a short list of the ways frugality and environmentalism intersect. I'm sure there are more, but these are just the ones I could think of during nap time.

Reducing Fossil Fuel Usage

This has got to be the number one way everyone can easily reduce their impact. I cannot speak highly enough about all the ways biking can improve your life, and mass transit, for all its downsides, is way better in almost every way than driving. Even when you and your kid are sitting next to two people who are so high that they can't sit upright, or the bus has been delayed because there's a fistfight going on (true stories), it beats the hassle of driving around dangerous assholes and, ugh, finding parking.

I know that many people will get huffy and declare that they have to drive because of their specific circumstances. I won't dispute that, since everyone knows their own situation. However, even if you have to drive there are plenty of ways to reduce the amount you drive. Batching errands, walking or biking when you can, working from home, and staying in rather than going out are all easy ways to reduce your driving. These things also save you time and reduce your personal exposure to car emissions. Here are a few ways less driving can improve your life in addition to reducing your personal emissions: less driving means less wear and tear on your vehicle, meaning less time and money spent on maintenance, and less time spent pumping gas. More time out of the car reduces the health impact of being in the car (do not underestimate that) and thus increases the amount of happy, healthy life you're likely to have. Stopping at the store when you're tired from a full day of work might seem like a hassle but it will save you more hassle later. It also reduces the amount of time you're willing to spend in the store, making it more likely that you'll stick with your list. (You do carry a list, right?)

But eliminating or reducing driving isn't the only way frugal people save on fossil fuel use. Turning down the heat in your house and turning off the air conditioner can save you some serious cash but they also reduce the amount of natural gas, coal, and oil that are used. The invention of stable, reliable heat and a way to cool things down are fantastic, but not at the expense of the stable climate we depend on. Heating or cooling yourself first is a very basic way to reduce the amount of heating and cooling you need for your home.

Since we live in a cool area, I don't know that we'll ever get air conditioning. I'd rather leave that for vulnerable places where air conditioning can mean life or death: hospitals and nursing homes. We can use other methods of cooling down, like getting outside into the shade, fans, cross-breezes, drinking cool liquids, cool showers and swimming, eating foods that don't require cooking, and retreating to the basement when it gets too hot. We can also use landscaping and curtains to make our house need less heating and cooling. In the winter we do the opposite, eating and drinking hot things, throwing on sweaters, cooking and baking, wrapping ourselves in cozy blankets and snuggling.

Of course, I'm not the only one who matters here. In my own household we have the heat debate. If it were just me, I'd have the winter heating set at 60F during the day and 55F at night. But it's not just me. My spouse thinks I'm insane and wants the house warm enough to be comfortable while wearing shorts all winter. We also have a renter, who has no control over how warm his living space is. We have a compromise that neither HusbandX or I are fully happy with, so we grumble to each other still, but it works. When it's just me and the kids at home the heat goes way down, and I turn it back up to 68F about half an hour before my husband comes home. What I've found most interesting about this is how the kids and I have adapted to the cold temps. When I turn the heat up in the evening the house starts to feel too warm. Acclimation isn't as difficult as it's made to seem, and forcing our bodies to get used to seasonal change probably isn't a bad thing, since that's what we evolved to do.


Reducing Food Expenditure and Waste

Reducing food waste not only helps your budget, it also reduces the amount of farmland needed and reduces the waste of packaging and fossil fuels spent to get the products to you. All the usual tips about eating leftovers or only cooking and buying as much as you will eat apply, but that only affects things on your end. One of the biggest sources of food waste in this country is actually at the farm level, since only certain products meet grocery store standards. Seeking out ways to source "seconds", or items that don't meet those standards, is both cheaper (because of no grocery store markup) and more environmentally friendly. I've had good luck with roadside stands, which frequently sell seconds. There's one near my mom's house that sells honeycrisp apples for $6 per 7 lb. bag. Farmer's markets are also better, because they don't have to meet the stringent grocery store standards. If you ask around, you might be able to find farmers willing to sell you the odd produce that they don't think most people would buy, and are happy to because it increases their profit margin. In my experience, kids especially love picking out the funny looking produce and eating it. It's like a little experiment for them--will this funny-looking strawberry taste like a normal strawberry? And getting them used to funky produce at young ages normalizes it.

In some areas there's a CSA called Imperfect Produce that I've heard highly of from friends. We haven't tried it ourselves because I tend to like going to the farmer's market. I like the interaction and being able to stock up on things for canning or the freezer as they're in season. I'm also lucky enough to have a farmer's market nearby that's open year-round and there's a bus that takes me basically from door to door. But if the CSA model works for you, check out Imperfect Produce (or any other local CSA, if they're not in your area).

If those options aren't for you, people in Buy Nothing groups will sometimes offer up food. Leftovers that are going to go bad because someone's leaving town unexpectedly, an opened package that was discovered not to be to the person's taste, food gifts that the receiver knows won't get eaten. It all goes back to reducing food waste, but also helps neighbors by passing it along to someone who needs it or will put it to good use. Even if you don't want someone else's castoffs, offering your own potential food waste can help keep it from landfills and help your less food-secure neighbors.

Buying less (or no) meat can also be one of the biggest ways to reduce a household's food budget. We've experimented with the amount of meat we eat and have concluded that, for health reasons, meat needs to be part of our diets. However, reducing the meat we eat and eating from better sources when we do are the ways we reduce the environmental toll. Hunting can be sustainable, if done correctly. In some areas predators have been driven away so much that animals such as deer are overrunning the ecological limits and becoming a menace. Hunting means no factory farms, so you don't have to worry about what hormones are in the meat, antibiotic use, and a host of other issues that come with our current "farming" system.

Blueberries hardening off before I plant them.

Many frugal people have gardens, and for good reason. A lot can be grown for relatively little in startup costs, depending how you're going to do it. Even if it doesn't save you much money at times, the taste of homegrown food beats anything you can get at the store. Ever tried homegrown celery? The flavor is powerful, and helped me understand why it was ever cultivated in the first place. And if veggie growing isn't your thing, you can plant perennials that pay dividends for years, or even a lifetime. Even apartment dwellers can plant herbs in sunny windows or plants in pots on a balcony, and community gardens have exploded in popularity for good reason.

Foraging is another great way to save money and eat what would otherwise go to waste. It's amazing to me how much free food there is around. Blackberries, apples, and plums all grow in many places around my area and those are just the ones I know about. Amateur mycologists might know where morels and other edible mushrooms grow. In Alaska I foraged blueberries and cranberries every year. I've even grabbed dandelion greens to supplement salads when my garden isn't producing quite enough lettuce. (Though they're very bitter--best as a supplement rather than the main attraction.) It's sad how much produce just falls and rots on the ground. Don't let it go to waste, eat it!


Not Buying Stuff, and Sourcing Used Whenever Possible

I know quite a few people who've looked in their closets and, fed up, declared a clothes-buying ban. Most people's closets are so stuffed and so overrun with clothes that we could go for years without buying clothes without really noticing. I do know people who, mostly through health problems, have weights that fluctuate between several different sizes. In that case, keeping more than one size on hand can be the right and frugal choice. For many of us, however, there are clothes we own that haven't seen the light of day in many moons and likely never will again. Do yourself a favor and pass those along, either through your Buy Nothing group or to Goodwill. Then, stop shopping. Buying ban accomplished.

This can be done with any number of things. Do you really need the things you're buying, or do you just want them? This is important because everything we buy--everything--has an environmental toll. It's much harder to justify buying crap when you think about the entire life cycle of the item and the slow death of our planet that's caused by its creation and destruction. A new phone every couple of years can seem like a pretty asinine choice when looked at that way.

Inevitably, however, you will need things. Gearing up my older girl for outdoor preschool this year, we realized we needed a bunch of warm gear. Seattle might not get that cold in absolute terms, but being out in the rain and chill for four hours every morning can be tough on a tiny human. The school provided rain suits but the rest was up to us. I asked around on Buy Nothing for the winter gear we needed, then checked Goodwill, and those two sources provided everything we needed to outfit her. If she loses something (all her gloves) or gets something filthy and torn (every day) then I'm also not upset like I would be if I'd spent some serious money on her clothes. Best of all, it was easier to check those two places than shopping a bunch of different places and looking for deals would have been. Even looking online takes a massive amount of effort and frugality of my time is just as important as that of any other resource. As all those endless motivational posters tell you, you've only got one life. Do you really want to spend it shopping?

I'm saving myself even more time and money by setting aside what I can, what's not ruined, for my younger daughter. Reducing the amount that I have to seek out for both of my girls is effort well spent, since it means spending more time with them or, ya know, on the Holy Grail of any mom's desires, time to myself. As my younger daughter outgrows things I'm setting some aside for friends and the rest I'm passing along to either my Buy Nothing group or to a charity that takes used baby items for distribution to poor families in my county.


Increasing Efficiency

In addition to reducing things, increasing efficiency is the other half of the equation. Things like living in a smaller space, or having more people living in a larger one, can greatly increase the efficiency of a living situation. Making that living space as efficient as possible in terms of resource usage--water, heating and cooling, electricity--all save tons of money as well. Those seem like no-brainers. Why wouldn't you want to upgrade your space so that it saves you money and is kinder to the environment? Even better, it saves you time since things like LEDs don't require changing as often and, if you pocket the savings, you won't have to spend as much of your life working. There's literally no downside.

Other facets of this are things like only running the dishwasher and washing machine when you have full loads, or turning off the water when you're brushing your teeth or shaving. After all, it's highly inefficient to have the water running when it's not actively being used. These are small things that everyone can do. Small, but powerful.


Reusing, Repairing, and Re-purposing

I have a potted plant hanging in my bathroom. You might not notice at first or even sixth glance, but the plant is entirely encased in plastic waste. When I got the plant as a cutting, I didn't have a pot for it. So I made one out of an old milk jug. Then I didn't have any more flat surfaces to put it on, due to the large number of plants I already had, but I did have a hook in the ceiling. I figured out how to cut up plastic grocery bags, tie them together, and then crochet them. Since I used brown plastic bags, it looks a lot like a straw basket. HusbandX made the hanger for it out of an old nail he bent into a circle. You tell me if it looks horrible, but not one person has ever seen it and wondered what the heck was wrong with my plant's container. (Yes, I do have friends who would be that brutally honest.)

My plastic waste plant, in
need of a trim.

This works with most items around the house, and in addition to saving money and reducing your garbage output, it stretches your creativity. How many facets of our adult lives actually do that? Instead of playing brain games, spend some time coming up with creative solutions for simple problems. I've turned torn t-shirts into nightgowns for my daughter. I've serged the edges of an old torn sheet to use as baby wipes instead of buying the disposable kind. I use the clips from balloons we've been given as 'chip clips', for flour and sugar bags. Once you start looking, there's almost always a creative solution to an issue, and a way to reuse or repurpose items that would otherwise just go to the landfill.

Similarly, I could have simply thrown out the duvet that got a hole in it. Not a giant, gaping hole. Just a small one. And the duvet is old, it has some stains on it. It would have been easy to tell myself that it was worth it to get a new one. Instead, despite being a terrible seamstress, I set out to repair the hole. And I did it, like a boss. Three years later that same duvet is still on our bed, the scar covered up by the cover so that only we know it's there. (And my spouse has probably forgotten.) I also get the satisfaction of knowing that I increased my skills a little bit. I'm a terrible seamstress, but I'm less bad than I was before.

These things don't have to take forever. When you eliminate most of the time you spend shopping from your life, it's incredible how much more "free" time you have. The fifteen minutes it took to repair the hole is a drop in the bucket compared to the time I would have spent trying to buy a new duvet. Cutting up and sewing my homemade baby wipes took a couple of hours but I've never had to run out and buy what are, essentially, disposable poop rags.  Not spending my money on one-time-use disposables means that I can afford to work part-time, which gives me more time at home to do these projects and to spend time with my family. Very cyclical, but in my experience the cost, time, and environmental savings of small things intersect incredibly well.

The skirt I made when my favorite pair of jeans died.

Our society, our planet, has a giant waste problem. Frankly, I think we pay far too little for garbage service. The fact that recycling is free in my area shocks me, because it's sort of covering up the fact that even recycling is pretty wasteful. With geopolitical problems right now and problems on the home end, it also might not be free for too much longer. Reusing things so that they never enter the waste stream in the first place can help the goal of zero waste. And if you have a wasteful habit that you really, really love--like a Keurig coffee maker--look for ways to make it less wasteful.


Embracing Difficulty

This is by far the most abstract but probably the most important place where frugality and environmentalism intersect. When you make a conscious choice to embrace either mindset, you must embrace doing the difficult thing. It's easy to throw money at a problem or to drive everywhere. It's not so easy to deny yourself things or walk to the grocery store with two small children. (Ask me how I know.) If a person really wants to stop living paycheck to paycheck, though, they need to embrace the difficult choices and figure out what can be cut from their budget, or what they can do to earn extra money. It's difficult and no one wants to do it, but making a better future for yourself is worth it. The same thing holds true for the environment. We can't keep thinking of ourselves all the time, we need to be looking to the future and trying to make tomorrow better than today. We owe it to ourselves and everyone who comes after us, not to mention every other species on the planet, to build a better and less wasteful society. But we can't do that without first embracing the hard choices.

My brother reminded me that, during the Great Depression, my great-great grandparents* moved out of Missouri to live with their daughter...in her chicken coop. Think of how rough life has to get before living in a chicken coop is better than what you left behind. It makes my philosophy of embracing difficulty seem like a game. But, what they had left behind was an epic environmental disaster, one that could very well happen again if we don't course-correct. Never think you and yours won't be the ones living in chicken coops if you really have to.  Learn to suck it up now, in hopes of averting a chicken coop retirement.


As I said, we're no environmental paragons. We drive. We eat meat. We have kids, for goodness' sake, little resource-intensive needlings. Even trying to do things as environmentally friendly as I have time and energy for with regard to raising kids, they take a lot of resources. (Oh lordy, the amount of laundry with a new baby....) But the kids help me look to the future and clarify why I do the things I do. When I want to take the easy route, all I have to do is look in their little faces and remind myself that it's for them more than it is for me. Everyone has a reason, someone or something to give them hope that we can make the future better. For me, that's my kids.

I don't worry that humans will go extinct because of climate change but I do worry about the wars which will inevitably occur when resources become scarce. (Are occurring?) I worry about how pollution is affecting people right now, particularly the vulnerable brains of children. I worry about the people who have to live near factory farms and oil refineries. I worry about the animals who never asked to ingest plastic that humans created. It's worth embracing just about any difficulty now so that so much suffering and devastation is averted, both short- and long-term.

How many of us say we'd do anything for our kids, but we can't even turn down the heat? Our actions are making liars of us all. I'm striving to be less of a liar every day. It gets easier when you realize that humans are really adaptable. What was once super difficult becomes your new normal, and you can set the bar higher for yourself. If we all set that bar just a little bit higher, and a little bit higher, then we'll collectively be making the future better. The value of small, incremental change is highly overlooked. I can't do it all so why should I try at all? But even small changes can have a big impact over time, particularly when you implement more than one change. It's like the classic example of spending $5 on coffee daily. It's not that $5 is going to break most people's budgets, it's that the value of that money over time really will make an impact on both savings rate and how much a person needs to save before reaching financial independence/retirement. Similarly, doing small things all the time that are better for the environment, especially if you get others to do the same, compound over time to become significant. It won't take the place of political and international action on a massive scale, but it can build momentum so that such critical action seems attainable.



*Family historians, feel free to correct me on who, exactly, this was if I don't have it right.