The Booty of a Postal Pirate
The eighties were not about conservation. This was evident even in the care packages college students received from home. I’m not referring to the gifts themselves, but the materials used to post a package. Unaware of the un-biodegradable faux pas, I envied these slick presentations.
My folks, you see, were green before their time. I’d grown up eating salads grown in a garden that dwarfed the Amazon jungle. This garden was fueled by my mother’s impressive 6×6 foot compost heap. A heap that, to my great horror, replaced the very sand of my sandbox when I was six!My packages from home were anything but slick. How I envied those errant, glistening, Styrofoam peanuts, floating on the winds of change in other students’ rooms.
The contents of my care packages did not include airtight plastic packaging, or state-of-the-art stereo equipment. Instead I’d find the pair of underwear I had left under the bed on my last visit home, now washed and carefully folded, multi-vitamins and perhaps a yellowed, dog-eared, book of Shakespeare, signed to someone other than me, usually long before I was born (Mom loves used bookstores).
These items arrived in something not of this world, at least, not of the commerce driven world of flashy materialism. Never was an envelope disposed of in my family home. Instead, my mom, the postal pirate, after thoroughly appreciating the letter or gift she’d received, hoarded away the new bit of tree-pulp booty to be used at a later date. There was no Fed Ex box, no shiny new sheet of brown paper wrapping, no pristine, un-popped bubble wrap, involved in my care packages. Not that bubble wrap was unheard of. If someone had recently, or not so recently sent my parents something fragile involving bubble wrap, my mom might recycle it, but more likely she’d use the cotton from an empty vitamin bottle to nest a fragile item she was sending my way in one of her postal creations.
You see, my mother’s pleasure in counting how many times she could re-use an envelope, or, for that matter, a brown paper bag, bordered on maniacal glee. Her crazy euphoria was born of the joining of her twin passions: Artistic creativity and a fierce devotion to the sparing use of the Earth’s bountiful resources. She snipped the sides of envelopes, turned them inside out, did a bit of patching and taping and voila! A new envelope, capable of carrying her love from home to her college student emerged and satisfied her soul.
These oddly shaped packages were an embarrassment that set me apart from the pack. I would squirrel them away to my room, where I could open them in private. But over the years I have come to appreciate them in a completely different way. It touches me to think of my mother sitting at the phone desk, nipping, tucking, snipping, folding, taping and addressing each package with care. I can see her giggling as she inside-outs a letter from the IRS, or hums softly as she writes a few lines of poetry on an old envelope to include in the package. And in light or our present environmental situation, I now recognize the value of my mother’s lumpy packages- her creative labors of love- a love that extends beyond me to include the planet. Nowadays, I diligently store these recycled wonders that arrive from home.
The other day, when I discovered a white ankle sock, 1/8th a package of granola and a shower cap my parents had left behind after a recent visit, I pulled out my own box of recycled packaging paraphernalia; brown paper bags, recycled envelopes, cardboard from a recent stocking purchase, and set to work snipping, folding and taping. Then I wrote my parent’s address on the outside of the lumpy little package and sent it on its way.
The wisdom of our parents is not always immediately evident to us. But with the perspective of time, I’m quite sure I learned most everything good I know from a true friend of the planet: My mom, the postal pirate.
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Amy Waddell - Ecoist
Amy Waddell is a writer, director and film editor in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in over 20 film festivals all over the country. Her short film, The Mask Maker, won “best short†in the Chicago international Film Festival and her award winning documentary, The Reluctant Muse, aired nationally on PBS. She is a graduate of the USC Film School.
Tags: biodegradable packing materials, packaging, recycling, reducing, reusing