The Rural Voice, 1990-06, Page 3R.V.
general manager: Jim Fitzgerald
editor: Lise Gunby
contributing writers:
Adrian Vos
Gisele Ireland
Keith Roulston
Cord Wainman
Wayne Kelly
Sarah Borowski
Mary Lou Weiser -Hamilton
June Flath
Ian Wylie-Toal
Susan Glover
Bob Reid
Mervyn Erb
Peter Baltensperger
Darene Yavorsky
Sandra Orr
marketing and promotion:
Gerry Fortune
advertising sales:
Merle Gunby
production co-ordinator:
Tracey Rising
advertising production:
Rhea Hamilton -Seeger
office: 519-524-7668
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The Rural Voice
Box 37, 10A The Square
Goderich, Ontario
N7A 3Y5
BEHIND THE SCENES
by Jim Fitzgerald
General Manager
"Everything that goes around comes
around," as the old clich6, more or less,
has it. Whether it's styles in clothes or
colours in decorating, everything seems to
operate in cycles.
My in-laws, for instance, bought a
home about eight years ago. It had hor-
rible grey tiles and a pink marble counter-
top in the bathroom. They talked for years
of chiselling off those tiles and replacing
them and the sink with a modem colour.
Well, guess what? You're right: grey
and pink are "in" again. So a few weeks
ago they had some new wallpaper put up
to match the tiles and sink, and voila, an
brand new bathroom!
When I was a kid growing up in the
fifties, reduction, re -use, and recycling
were important in our house and on my
uncle Mac's farm, where I used to spend
summers. Of course, back then we had
never even heard of the word "recycling."
We called it "being cheap" — or being
"frugal," as my Scottish ancestors would
say in their lovely brogue.
I can still see my grandmother, who
journeyed to a strange, Spartan farming
existence in Lambton County in the
1870s, saying: "A penny saved is a penny
earned." And the "Dirty Thirties" only
served to reinforce the Presbyterian
certainty that bad weather always follows
good. My grandmother could look at a
gorgeous hot day in early May and say:
"We'll pay for this."
In those days, a "blue box" would
never have made it to curbside. It would
have made an ideal laundry basket, or a
box for our cat and her new kittens.
Besides, there wouldn't have bcen
anything to put in it. The few jars we did
get from "store bought" food would
quickly find themselves in the fruit cellar
filled with homemade jam or cord relish or
red hot chilli sauce, while the cans were
re -used in the pantry or sewing room or
workshop.
Each younger kid down the line wore
the clothes of his or her older sibling (a
really clever mother often bought unisex
clothes), and when they were too wom out
to pass on they were either rippcd apart
and made into another outfit or "recycled"
into quilts. My wife Lois, who comes
from a large Perth County farm fatnily, can
still look with nostalgia at an old quilt in
the family room of our home and see bits
of that old print dress she wore as an eight-
year-old. Why, even the expired Eaton's
catalogues were "re -used" in the outhouse.
It must have become instilled in my
bones, because I constantly feel guilty
about throwing anything out, whether it be
an old frying pan or a McDonald's styro-
foam container. I'm still using an old
lawnmower I rescued from the dump 10
years ago. It only needed a new spark
plug, some minor adjustments to its
carburetor, and a couple of four-letter
words applied at the appropriate moment.
Same goes for agriculture. In the old
days, the manure from the chickens, hogs,
and dairy cows was piled away and saved
for late spring, when it was carefully
worked into the com ground, which itself
had been recycled from pasture (which had
been hay fields, which had been under -
seeded oats, and so on and so on). The
weeds in the corn were carefully recycled
as well, with a hoe or the scuffler.
Out in the bam, all but the detergent
wash from the milkers went to the hogs,
as did all the edible scraps from the
kitchen. And the old worn-out laying hens
were recycled into soup, while the old axle
from the Model T was hammered and re -
tempered into a fine cold chisel.
That's why I, like many others who
remember those olden days of 40 years
ago, am pleased to see a return to those
old Scottish principles, now under a new
guise of "organic" or "ecological" farming.
Now I'm not suggesting for a minutc that
a return to the sometimes back -breaking
days of old could feed a now largely urban
population, but it's great to see some
sanity returning, albeit slowly, to agricul-
ture. The time has more than come again
to stop mining the soil and destroying the
lifeblood of our planet, merely for a few
more dollars of short-term profit. 0