It’s time

December marks the end of my first full year writing this column, and as 2009 approaches, it’s the perfect time for reflecting back and looking ahead.

Before I began writing this column, even though I was deeply concerned about environmental degradation, I wasn’t much of a green warrior. Over the course of the year, however, I have learned a great deal and consequently have incorporated small but substantive changes in my daily life.

Looking back, locally

Now I routinely bring my reusable bags into the grocery store and adamantly refuse any plastic bags, even for the fish or soap, delivering my mini-lecture on the evil of plastic bags to the poor cashier.

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Have another helping

We dined al fresco, as they say —sitting on a shaded patio, feeling the breezes coming off the nearby Ionian Sea. The table was long, the food was plentiful, the figs came fresh from the trees in the backyard—and most of all, we took our time.

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Pumpkin

My roommate brought the pumpkin home a few weeks before Halloween. He placed it on the windowsill in the living room of our apartment. He decorated the outside window bars with a large black spider and fake cobwebs. It looked great.

The pumpkin moved around a bit, and for a short time it rolled out the open window, coming to rest outside between the window and the bars, in a space usually reserved for air conditioners. I remember it unhappy on its side, rocking between the bars in the breeze.

Halloween came and went, and all of a sudden it was past due to take down the decorations. We decided to keep the spider, took it down and moved it inside. It now hovers over our kitchen table.

“Should we get rid of the pumpkin?” Mark said. It had now been moved back inside.

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