Rural Routes, Blog Version

For the second time in three years, I have retired.

I retired for the first time in June 2019. By March 2020, we were in pandemic mode. So, in October 2020 when I had an opportunity to temporarily return to my old job, I readily accepted. For the next eighteen months, I immersed myself in Zoom meetings and working remotely. It gave me something else to focus on besides COVID and I was thankful for that.

Six weeks after my final day, I am now trying to figure out what retirement should look like the second time around.

MOOMINS

I recently finished reading the eight-volume series of Moomin books by Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson. A thank you to my son for lending me the series.

The Moomins are trolls who look like hippopotami. Moomintroll, Moominpappa and Moominmamma live in Moominvalley. The books spawned a comic strip, TV show and a wide variety of merchandise worldwide.

These are children’s books, but like many children’s books, they highlight adult behaviour in an engaging way.

Some of them are chapter books; others are short story collections. I rationed myself to one chapter or one story a night, so that I could better focus on one a time. Some of the stories, especially near the end of the series, seemed more adult than others.

There are a host of other characters and creatures who regularly visit the Moomin family, each of them distinctive in their own way and each of them depicting some facet of the human condition – avarice, for example, or loneliness, or fatalism. Moominpappa dreams of being a hero in his own story; Moominmamma hides in plain sight behind the trees she paints on her walls.

CARBON FOOTPRINTS

I bought K a copy of “The Carbon Footprint of Everything” (Mike Berners-Lee Greystone Books; 2nd edition (April 19, 2022) because he had talked about wanting to read it. I ended up reading it, too.

It is an engaging and entertaining book, well researched and documented. But it disturbed me in several ways,

For one thing, the author seems to dislike livestock, beef in particular. This is where I have to declare that my husband and I owned a farm and ran a cow-calf operation. We knew our cows by name, and we do believe that cattle grazing can be part of a sustainable environmental plan. We have often felt unfairly targeted by environmental and animal rights groups.

I was expecting the comments on livestock, just as I was the facts and figures relating to plastics, oil, and coal mines. I had not thought of the carbon footprint of starting a family. Nor had I ever before faced the inevitable fact that the day my carbon footprint becomes the smallest will be the day I die.

Another one of the major points made in the book is that the carbon footprint is magnified wherever people come together en masse. Almost by definition, that makes any city problematic. The author also mentions sporting events, holiday gatherings and family events, exactly the kind of activity that we have missed so much during the pandemic. In that context, it almost seems as if humans and the environment are pitted one against the other. What’s good for one is bad for the other. It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is.

The book led me to think not only about human interaction, but also about the relationship between humans and the great outdoors.

COVID has not gone away, but restrictions have been relaxed and people feel freer to go about their lives more normally. There is now a renewed call for outdoor exposure, a COVID-era response to mental and physical health issues exacerbated by the pandemic that can be alleviated by nature. In my working life, I learned how important being outdoors is to early childhood development.

We need the outdoors, but it can do perfectly well without us.

So, although the book is humorous in many places and the author cites choices we can make in our lives to reduce our footprints, the overall impression it left on me was one of doom and gloom.

Years ago, I talked to my cousin’s husband about the fact that living in Iceland with its volcanoes must be stressful.

“Yes, someday it will blow up. But not today. Today I will live my life as best I can,” he said.

-30-