Do All That You Can

"Do all that you can with what you have for as long as you can."  Open Susan's Change Purse and we find this message waiting for us there.  An invitation to take stock of our resources and to be resourceful with them.  A promise to persevere.  The possibility of a silver lining.

Herons in Winter in the Frozen Marsh

All winter
two blue herons
hunkered in the frozen marsh,
like two columns of blue smoke.

What they ate
I can't imagine,
unless it was the small laces
of snow that settled

in the ruckus of the cattails,
or the glazed windows of ice
under the tired
pitchforks of their feet —

so the answer is
they ate nothing,
and nothing good could come of that.
They were mired in nature, and starving.

Still, every morning
they shrugged the rime from their shoulders,
and all day they
stood to attention

in the stubbled desolation.
I was filled with admiration,
sympathy,
and, of course, empathy.

It called for a miracle.
Finally the marsh softened,
and their wings cranked open
revealing the old blue light,

so that I thought: how could this possibly be
the blunt, dark finish?
First one, then the other, vanished
into the ditches and upheavals.

All spring, I watched the rising blue-green grass,
above its gleaming and substantial shadows,
toss in the breeze,
like wings.

Mary Oliver

Listening to Barbara Kingsolver

"We have dealt to today's kids the statistical hand of a shorter life expectancy than their parents, which would be us, the ones taking care of them … Eating has become the boring act of poking the thing in our mouths, with no feeling for any other stage in the process.  It's a pretty obvious consequence that one should care little about the product.  Then I ponder the question of why we eat so much bad food on purpose, this is my best guess: alimentary alienation.  We can't feel how or why it hurts.  We're dying for an antidote."

-- from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2008)

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for.  And the most you can do is live inside that hope.  Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.  What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.  Enough to eat, enough to go around.  The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.  That’s about it.  Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides."

-- from Animal Dreams (1990)

The Eastwood Food Project is one ingredient in the antidote.  Susan's Change Purse lives inside the hope for elementary kindness.

Why I Just Ate a Pop Tart

I just ate a Pop Tart.  198 calories and 55 grams of fat.  It tasted exactly as I remembered.  Sickeningly sweet.  Burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth-off hot.  Artificial.  A little like cardboard.  My sister Judith and I occasionally ate Pop Tarts for breakfast -- or instead of breakfast -- when we were teenagers.  Susan was always better organized than we were and made herself a proper sit-down meal.  If my mother knew then what we know now about the connection between learning and nutrition, she never would have permitted them in the house. No doubt she discouraged us from making this choice, but who was listening? 

I'm old enough now to know better, but I ate the Pop Tart anyway to figure out why they're still on the grocery store shelves.  After 40 years, what's the appeal?  I also wanted to spend a few minutes in the shoes of an Eastwood student who might make this choice over a healthier one.  Afterall, Susan's Change Purse is primarily about getting young minds going first thing in the morning with the fuel that fires learning.

What struck me about this unpretentious little "toaster pastry" was the speed at which it lands in your stomach and gives you a hit of energy.  Nothing that is that easy to prepare, goes down that quickly or costs so little can be good for you.

The healthy eaters at the Mayo Clinic advise that a good breakfast consists of:

• Whole grains. Options include whole-grain rolls, bagels, hot or cold whole-grain cereals, low-fat bran muffins, crackers, or melba toast.
• Low-fat protein. Options include hard-boiled eggs, peanut butter, lean slices of meat and poultry, or fish, such as water-packed tuna or slices of salmon.
• Low-fat dairy. Options include skim milk, low-fat yogurt and low-fat cheeses, such as cottage and natural cheeses.
• Fruits and vegetables. Options include fresh fruits and vegetables or 100 percent juice beverages without added sugar.

Whtat everyone needs is a mix of complex carbohydrates, fiber, protein and a small amount of fat that to get a full feeling that lasts for hours, they tell us.  But what I remember from my teenage years is that sleep matters more than food.  We were always looking for something fast, easy and inexpensive.  I guess I still am.

What do you eat in the morning -- or make your kids eat -- when on the run?  I wonder what they serve in the Eastwood cafeteria for breakfast these days?  (The lunch spread back in the '70s was hardly comparable to the salad bar at Whole Foods!)

Small Change

With the advent of the debit card, it's surprising that we still exchange coins and cash let alone hold on to them in wallets and change purses.  The introduction of loonies and toonies has only increased the need for piggy banks, trays on dressers, and cannisters to collect the remnants of our daily transactions in the marketplace.

My husband John buys two newspapers each morning at the corner store.  He usually throws a little less than $3 in change into a bowl in the hallway upon his return.  We keep it there for those days when we need change for a mad dash to the bus or subway.  One year we gathered up every jar and stash of coins in our house and took them down to the coin counting machine at our neighbourhood Loblaws.  We were shocked to discover how much we had "saved" over time.  If only we had put it in the bank, we would have experienced the miracle of compound interest -- or so our old Eastwood classmate and The Wealthy Barber Dave Chilton counsels.

When I remember my maternal grandfather Bill Jones, I think of pennies, dimes and quarters carefully rolled with brown paper and put under the Christmas tree for his five grandchildren.  A silver dollar too.  On our birthdays, there would be a five dollar bill in a card.  If you were lucky, you'd find coins stuffed between the cushions of a chair or couch at my grandparents' house.  The rule was "finders keepers, losers weepers."

Bill was one of ten children raised on a farm near Marmora just east of Peterborough.  He came of age during the Great Depression.  To explain how poor he was growing up, he'd tell us (many times over) that he only went to school every tenth day -- when it was his turn to wear his family's one pair of boots.  We knew that he was exaggerating but there was a whiff of truth to his story.

Like many of Eastwood's current students, my grandparents were the children of immigrants.  We knew that our family could trace its roots back to the Welsh and Irish immigrants who were among the last to arrive in the first big wave of newcomers.  The good farmland in southwestern Ontario had been taken by that time, leaving the rougher terrain for the latecomers.  Not long ago, I asked one of my mother's cousins what we harvested from the fields surrounding the old Jones homestead.  "Rocks," he replied with a sigh followed by a broad smile.

My sisters and I come from a family, community and country that has historically counted its pennies.  We've watched those pennies turn into dollars with time, discipline, patience, hard work and good humour.  This is why we're excited about opening Susan's Change Purse to make small investments in one high school's response to a food access problem.  It might turn into something big -- big in its impact on Eastwood students where they live, learn and lead.  And in its impact on us -- a generation that continues to benefit and learn from the resourcefulness of previous ones.

Where do you keep your small change?  How do you usually spend it?

PS:  Yes, that is a photo of one of Susan's change purses.

The Work of Winter

In late November, two months after Susan's memorial service in Peterborough, we gathered for a second service in Kitchener-Waterloo -- in the place she thought of as home.

Susan's Change Purse and The Eastwood Food Project were introduced to 90 friends and family members that day.  Everyone was invited to reach into their pockets and throw their loose change into the purse. $515.85 was donated along with promises of time and skills to guide the growth of the purse and the project.

Just before Christmas, both were introduced to the world through a new online grassroots grant-making community called the Small Change Fund.  The fund gives us the capacity to invite many more people to contribute small amounts of money in the $5 - $20 range and to give of themselves to The Eastwood Food Project.

Environmentalists Mary McGrath from Kitchener and Ruth Richardson from Toronto are the Small Change Fund's co-founders.  They believe people like us know how to figure out and fix community problems.  They believe we can make change without a lot of money or exhaustive research.  They believe we want to help each other.  They've made it very simple for us to prove them right.

Take a look.  Click here for a quick overview of the Eastwood Food Project.  Make a donation with your credit card.  In an instant, a charitable tax receipt lands in your e-mail inbox.  The entire transaction takes less than five minutes.

With the Small Change Fund, Ruth and Mary are creating space for social change to take root in communities like ours across Canada and around the world.  They are wizards with new media and technology, but they are master gardeners at heart.  They understand how things grow in the real world: slowly, unpredictably and often imperceptibly.  We do too.  This is why we're so excited, and grateful for the opportunity, to be part of their new initiative.

The Eastwood Food Project is a handful of very small but potent seeds that were planted in fertile southwestern Ontario soil just before the first snowfall last year.  But if we're going to see any green shoots this spring, there is work to do over the winter: connecting with students, staff and others to learn more about the issues, imagine and plan first steps, divvy up tasks, locate the necessary tools -- and increase the size of Susan's Change Purse, of course!

Trees in winter, we're told, experience their greatest root growth.  Seeds lie dormant in winter awaiting the right conditions for germination.  It is a season of intense creativity even though everything appears dark, bleak and barren on the surface.  It is also the riskiest time in the lifecycle of a plant.  The work of winter, therefore, is to keep the hope within robust seeds alive long enough for them to become viable seedlings.

Are you a hopeful gardener?  Has anything about this project captured your imagination?  What would you like to contribute during its first winter?  Send us a note at susanschangepurse[at]gmail.com if you're ready to roll up your sleeves and dig in.