The Daily: 20 January 2025

Today, we are not talking about the travesty of an inauguration that is happening somewhat south of here. I am doing my utmost to draw lines around my world and stay within those lines. I am not paying attention to things that I can’t change and that don’t truly affect me directly anyway. On that front, I’m a bit more concerned about my sons, but that’s probably just irrational mother-worry, a need to protect them from all exigencies, reality based or otherwise. Probably otherwise. Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge if we get there. For now, I am focusing on living my actual life in my small part of the actual world. I sort of believe that if everybody did the same, with a heaping side helping of helping others around them, there wouldn’t be things like Trump.

Today, I am also not talking about Martin Luther King Jr. I think he would be appalled by today. There might be more of Black Power Martin than I Have a Dream Martin if he were here now. I wish we could have either Martin, that he could have lived his natural life and done as much good as that life promised. But we can’t have nice things… We get Trump.

So today, I am doing the spring clean. I like to have the bulky jobs done by Candlemas, so I am not bogged down by cleaning when I want to start the garden tasks.

There are reasons for cleaning in the winter. Or really at all. It’s not because we don’t like disorder and mess, or not only that. Dirty things don’t last as long. There are millions of microbes in every smear of soil and every droplet of water, most of which exist explicitly to decompose matter. Ergo, dirty stuff rots. Old housewives probably didn’t know about microbes; however, they had ample experience with the breakdown of stuff to note that the cleaner something is the longer it lasts.

We’ve taken it to the opposite extreme now. Our cleaners are just as good at breaking down stuff as microbes, through too many or too few hydrogen atoms, caustic or acidic, sometimes both. Further, much of what we have around us is composed of toxic compounds that are only nominally stable. So using caustic detergents on mostly plastic clothing, for example, is just flooding your world with things that are killing you — and everything else.

My goal is finding a happy medium. Remove the dirt mostly by keeping it outside. Wipe up spills. Use soaps where there are stubborn messes, but don’t worry too much about stains. These are largely organic residues and not likely to harm you. (Except for the fact that many dyes are also petrochemicals and therefore highly toxic even in small amounts.) Use detergents and acids only when you need to break things down, as in when you need to clean fatty or oily build-up or charred carbohydrates which are all rather insoluble in water. So, to clean the oven, for example, one of my least favorite tasks, but one that I always find necessary at this time of year because the house is closed up tight and whatever mess is in the oven is stinking up the whole building. Sometimes for days.

January cleaning also usually involves finally putting away the last of Midwinter and moving forward to the season of Imbolg, spring in the belly — though not yet spring in actuality. Putting away Yule usually begins after Plough Monday, though it can start as early as Boxing Day with me boxing up the stuff that is strictly tied to Yuletide. But that is not much of my Midwinter decorating. Most is just winter, evergreens and pine cones and acorns and lots of sparkle and lights to mimic ice and starlight. I also have a Moon theme going on. Maybe it’s the dreamy long nights, but I find I am more drawn to moon-gazing in the deep winter than I am in the summer when it far more comfortable to see the Moon. I will confess that I have not yet taken down the Christmas tree. That is happening, possibly as you read these words. But as it is not especially tied to Christmas and more of an expression of my life in winter — heavy on New Mexico since that is where most of my winters have happened — I do not feel bad about leaving it up this long. It is still winter, after all, as most of you in this country can vouch for.

Here in central Vermont, winter is raw today. However, it did warm up a bit above freezing on Saturday, the typical mid-January thaw coming in right on time, though with strong winds that effectively cancelled out the warmth. However, I finally got much of the snow and ice off of my walk. Much, but not all. Now, I wonder if I should have just left it, because the leftover bits turned to solid ice overnight. Today, there is more snow to cover the ice, but the path is lumpy and slippery still. And there is no more of the January thaw in sight.

Temperatures have been falling since Sunday morning and will continue to do so if the forecast is at all accurate. In this case, there is reason to believe that it is because this pattern has been playing out all across the eastern US this week. My mother called from Indianapolis on Saturday to say that temperatures were dropping to 0°F after a day of cold rain, so a drop of about 35°F in one afternoon. Sunday, Trump decided that he would be inaugurated indoors so his precious old fart body is not exposed to the freezing rain and cold in Washington DC. Today, Vermont won’t see highs much above 0°F. Tomorrow’s forecasted high is -2°. I am not looking forward to going back to work. But at least I have a nice pot of stew to keep me warm.

As part of the cleaning process, I finally roasted the last of the winter squash. I will be making this mash into empanada filling and perhaps a savory pie or two. But I also baked bread and used the squash to make what I am calling beta-carotene and goat cheese stew. There are about a dozen carrots, a couple roasted sweet potatoes, boiled white beans, and steamed wild rice in a base of goat cheese, vegetable broth and several cups of fresh roasted squash purée. I added my standard comfort herb mix of rubbed sage, thyme, allspice, cumin and chile, in this case chipotle chile, which gives the whole pot a warm scent and a hot flavor, as well deepening the color of the orange veg into a rich sunset russet. In this weather, I take whatever warmth I can get, real or imagined.

I am going through my usual winter shedding also right now. I’ve piled up all the clothes that I have not used enough to warrant space in my not exactly spacious closet. I have a small box of books that I don’t want and a larger box of DVDs that were sort of dumped on me because nobody else in the family uses such quaint technology anymore. I do… but not for things like The Godfather… This year, I am also starting to winnow out some things that I needed when there were more bodies to be fed and more gatherings to be hosted. I have acquired several cakes stands over the years, which is silly because I don’t even like cake. I sure don’t need to display cake… I also have more baking dishes than I could ever use. Some of these are hand-me-downs or gifts. Others are my attempt to find the perfect dish for cooking veg without turning it into cardboard. But none of them are perfect. Because none of them have lids, meaning if I want to bake a casserole I have to use foil to keep it moist. And I am sort of done with foil. It’s such an expensive waste. In fact, my birthday present to me — paid for by a generous gift card from my department head who is, sadly, now retired — is a Le Creuset 9×11″ deep baking dish with a high rounded lid. In bright red. I thought that was necessary (hey, I’m cold…). I can use that pan for everything from lasagna to baking potatoes, no foil necessary, probably for the rest of my life. How’s that for waste reduction!

I do like getting rid of stuff, cleaning out the excess, but only if I feel that it will be used and not turned into trash. Especially toxic trash. If it seems like something toxic like electronics or plastic is just going to the landfill — and most of it is, recycling claims notwithstanding — I am more inclined to box it up and store it in my attic. The only exception to this is batteries. You can’t store those things, especially not in a space that gets very hot in the summer months. Batteries explode, you know. But even if they are kept cool, they still corrode and leak nasty acid all over everything. This is a conundrum… Because if they are going to leak nasty acid in the attic, they are going to leak nasty acid in the landfill, harming many more critters than what lives in my attic (most of whom I don’t want living in my attic, but that’s another issue). My solution to this is to simply not buy batteries if I can help it. I have batteries in the smoke detectors and in a few clocks. I have a couple flashlights, one in the kitchen and one in the basement, though I can’t remember the last time that I used one. And that’s it for acid-based batteries. There are, of course, other solid-state batteries in the phone and this computer and the thermometers in my kitchen and medicine cabinet. I can’t say I have ever replaced those. I don’t actually know how in the case of the thermometers.

I also do not get rid of stuff that I might use again. The clothes that I am shedding have not been worn in at least a year. Mostly they are things that I don’t want to wear, maybe never did want to wear, things that are too young for my staid and sober age (ha…), or things that were given to me as gifts and I only ever wore them to assuage guilt. Maybe. Once. I also don’t generally get rid of books or music or movies because if I buy it once I usually return to it again and again and again. And until this year, I haven’t shed kitchen tools. Because who knows when some thing is going to be essential to a recipe I want to try, and how will I ever find it again? But I think I can reasonably expect to never need a cake stand. I will certainly not buy one again, and that is the principal motivation in keeping stuff that I am not using now but may use again in the future. I don’t want to buy stuff. I can’t afford it, but more importantly the planet can’t afford it. Also who knows, but I might be able to creatively repurpose this thing that is not serving me well in its original function. Truly, I think that is why the cake stands showed up in the first place. My bookstore hosted Fancy Nancy tea parties with some regularity, and I used the cake stands in the book displays… and for piles of petits fours, which are, of course, necessary for a Fancy Nancy tea party.

I don’t like buying things, but I also don’t like the things that are available to be bought these days. It is impossible to find quality in an economy that is trying to maintain profits by cutting costs on materials and labor while those costs — especially transport — are rising everywhere. Whatever you buy through the market, no matter how much you spend, it’s going to be crap. It will not be what you think you bought. It will not work as you think it should. It will not last a year. And it will be mostly plastic and so when it breaks, it is permanently toxic trash. This is not a recipe for happiness. I honestly don’t know what people mean by shopping therapy…

In the last year or two, I have been buying clothes for banking. It has been an exercise in frustration. First, the kind of places I prefer to shop locally do not sell banking clothes. They sell off-beat, largely hand-made, comfortable clothes. This is Vermont, after all. And all my existing wardrobe was from New Mexico… even more not banking.

So I’ve been buying from online sources (I refuse to shop at Walmart and Kohl’s which are really the only box options here). But even when I shop from the most responsible and trustworthy vendors I can find and pay far more than I’d like, I am getting crap. The buttons fall off, the zippers are put in crooked and break, and there seems to be a general lack of seam stitching. Sweaters, especially, can just fall apart into their constituent pieces like they have leprosy. And then there are the sizes… First, vanity sizing means that the numbers you see mean NOTHING. Second, while a 1950s size-12 might now be labeled a size-6, it is not going to fit a size-12 body like it did in the 1950s. Material cost-cutting has led to very strange material fabric cutting. Where there used to be darts and godets to accommodate rounded bodies, because no body is linear, that extra work and extra fabric are now gone. This is particularly apparent in sleeves. You can’t buy a coat with sleeves that will fit over a sweater because the sleeves actually are a size-6 on a size-12 coat. And they are perfectly cylindrical, a rolled up rectangle, same diameter from wrist to shoulder. Which would be funny, if it weren’t so expensively useless.

Trash… that is what we make. And that is what there is for sale. So I hate buying new stuff. I would rather hold on to the stuff I have and hope to repurpose it. Or if I have nothing that approximates a need, I like to find old things in vintage shops and antique stores. My house is full of old stuff. Including me… I like it that way. It is filled with stories and memories and calming textures and colors.

I also have very little plastic. I was part of Friends of the Earth back in the late 80s when they first started the no-plastic campaign. You could say I was an early adopter to that ideology. It helped immensely that I never liked the plastic aesthetic. I don’t much like anything Modern, really. Too cold. Too hard. Too many sharp edges that find your shins in the middle of the night. But plastic is ugly. It smells funny. It has a nasty texture. And it looks wrong. Too smooth. Too fake. Too… plastic. So when I found out that it was also poison that lasted for centuries, spreading harm throughout the biosphere, and that it was a byproduct of oil refining, the stuff that was polluting the atmosphere and heating up the planet and causing social chaos in the Middle East, and that it was more or less dumped on us by industrialists who quite blatantly wanted to keep the war economy going by making disposable product, that is, trash, I was only too happy to jump on that bandwagon. No plastic for me…

But it is very hard to avoid these days. Everything is made of plastic. Everything is trash. So I hate shopping. I keep what I have working as long as it will, and I buy old stuff that somebody else has kept working, or refurbished to work anew. Keeping things working means keeping them clean, as well as in good repair. And it means using them gently. And sometimes keeping things from becoming trash is just keeping things in a box in the attic. Maybe someday someone smarter than us will have figured out how to deal with our toxic messes…

I wish they could come back in time and deal with Trump… maybe give us Martin back…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025