Business as usual on Earth Day

I felt a little guilty when a friend said she was turning off her computer for Earth Day; I had no plans to commemorate the day on my own or “celebrate” the day with my son. I’ve been so busy during the day with work during the day and in the evenings with organizing a meeting on local food, arranging to meet up with a mom to buy used maternity clothes, and attending a workshop on children’s gardens, I plum forgot that April 22 was the magic day to be cheering on the earth.

And then I thought about what I had planned to do on that day. I’d open my front door to find a box of produce from a local farm, complete with lettuce yanked freshly out of the ground yesterday a few counties away. I’d water our bay window seedlings waiting to be planted in the ground. I’d walk my son to his Spanish morning program (but drive to pick him up so I can do it on the way home from picking up my meat, milk, and egg farm order from a grassfed Amish farm in Pennsylvania). Then we’d have lunch (maybe outside!) before my midwife came over for my 26-week appointment where we’d talk about my plans for a (fingers crossed) no-tech, drug-free birth at home.

After that, who knows? I’m just not up for taking the Metro downtown to the Mall today, but maybe we’ll walk to the library. We have a hike and a natural dyeing day planned for the weekend. Maybe next year I’ll have a little less on my organizing plate and will start some kind of ritual to mark the day, or I’ll join in the local activities. Maybe by then I will have canceled the newspaper subscription to the Washington Post so we don’t have a mound of papers to rival the magma of Iceland’s volcano waiting to be bagged up for recycling. Maybe by then we’ll have an outdoor clothesline installed, and we’ll have our garden fully planted in the ground after a successful first season in this house.

We’re not perfect, but for now, I feel like we do a decent job of living the mantra of a CD my son loves, Earth Day, Everyday.