Recycling
Ma had a lot of financial challenges that is why she was an expert
in recycling. Corn meal came in a cotton
bag with big red letters of the company that manufactured it. Ma emptied the corn meal into a tin and took
a pair of scissors.
rice gone now it's a shopping or beach bag
She opened the seams
making it a square cloth. She put it in
bleach to remove the offending red letters.
She rinsed the bleach and voila, we had white dish towels. Come to think of it, they were designer dish
towels.
She washed marmalade bottles and used them for salt, sugar etc. I consume so much honey, bees of the world might
attack me one of these days. I recently
used the honey bottles for turmeric and cinnamon I bought for a new recipe I
was trying out.
Ma had a little garden. We
had strict instructions to put potato peels, onions, cabbage, carrot leaves,
orange, and banana peels in a glass bowl.
We took turns emptying in the backyard.
We couldn’t understand the fuss, but Ma said it was compost.
I didn’t believe her then because Ma was an employer. She created work for us, especially when we
were on the street playing. We viewed
everything she did with suspicion. We
did not see the compost heap as recycling.
It was work to us.
Well! I must follow family tradition and recycle, using these
color-coded bins the municipality places at strategic corners of the city.
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