It’s finally a beautiful sunny Sunday in Maine. I’ve had a long week at the Yarn shop and I am sitting outside with two of the three dogs, my knitting, and watching my husband build a birdbath with a thousand pound (or so) hunk of granite. A marvelous day to spend outside in the sunshine with our little family. Lola has decided to stay inside. Too many scary things outside that she can’t control. Ha! Ha!

We were taking in the last week about trash. Consuming stuff that leaves behind trash. Packaging, plastic, food scraps, stuff. We like our stuff. We take it to the beach, on vacation in the car, to the theater, we take stuff everywhere. And often we leave it there. That, in the olden days was called being a litter bug. (Does anybody remember the commercial, “please, please, don’t be a litter bug ‘cuz every litter bit hurts”?)

We live on a lake. We have snowmobilers and ice fishermen (and women) in the winter and all sorts of fisher-people and boaters in the other months. And every season we find their stuff in our lake and on the shores. We have found dead animals (yes, really!), garbage, balls, clothing and even human waste. It’s gross. Not to mention polluting. It threatens the clarity of our lake water. The noise can be deafening, too; Radios blaring, vehicles and boats with noisy engines/mufflers that zoom by. Beer cans and bottles.

We all have a responsibility to care for this precious planet that we call home. For our own sake and for the sake of our children and grandchildren. As a good Girl Scout, I learned to stay on the path and to carry in/carry out. My parents taught me to clean up after myself and leave the place better than I found it. I try to make that happen everywhere I go. We pick up trash on the beach. On walks in the woods. When we are out on our boat. We recycle. We bring our own bags when we shop. We bring bags for our trash when we travel and we find trash containers at the beach.

If we all do our part, maybe we can leave a healthy vibrant planet Earth for generations to come. Celebrate each day as Earth Day. We only get one chance. I’m stepping off my soapbox now.

Gone knitting.