Mersedez Clifford - 2021

In Grandma's Lifetime

The inspiration for this piece came from my own, wonderful Grandmother, who is crazy enough to collect plastic eating utensils from public events, take them home, wash them, and use them until they break. But in the course of learning the material in Unveiling the Anthropocene, I thought, “Is it really that crazy?” Today, we often wonder so much what it was like to live in a world that didn’t have so much technology, so much pollution, so much waste. The answer to those questions is hiding in plain sight: our grandparents. Most of them were born and grew up before the major technological advancements that brought us to where we are today as a world. They were raised to value quality over quantity and to not waste. They witnessed the evolution of civilization for over the last half a century, and they can tell us the difference between now and then. From the values of the past that we seem to have lost in society today, we can glean a brighter future for our children and grandchildren.

In Grandma’s Lifetime

Written by Mersedez Clifford

As I open the screen,
The sun bright to my back,
I’m greeted by the familiar creak of the door,
There revealing the most lovely sight,
Of the family’s most beloved treasure.

Full of wisdom and grace,
Covered in lipstick and baggy wrinkles,
Eyes gleaming with a mischievous hue,
Brimmed with stories from the days of yore,
Sits Grandma at the kitchen table,
Her monthly magazine clutched in her hand,
As she reads the new updates from the outside world.

She looks up in glee,
Takes the glasses from her eyes,
And clutches me so tightly,
Leaving the most slippery kiss on my cheek.
“Come, hear what I’ve read,” she tells us,
As she brandishes her magazine like a mace,
Pointing at each of us in turn,
As we take our seats around her table.

She reads to us the opening line:
“West African black rhinoceros declared extinct.”1
The article continues; the news saddens.
It seems the rhinoceroses were plenteous,
And as time continued the humans craved them--
For their horns, for their land.

But the rhinoceros isn’t the only one at stake;

“One million species face extinction today,”2
The article concludes in its somber way,
Denoting that the cause to be human based.
Over hunting, it says.
Deforestation, it says.

Grandma stops reading and takes off her glasses,
Looking out the windows at the birds.
She reminisces of her childhood.
She remembers growing up on the edge of the town.
Her home within walking distance to the center,
But the outskirts were nothing but land--
Plains of grass and grain and forest.

She remembers the farms that she would pass,
One every few miles on a nice drive.
The air was clean and fresh.
The time plenteous, as a nation,
Just recovered from war and recession,
Focused on rebuilding from the ground up.
Fast on the track of new technologies,
Industry after industry moved in;
Things changed over the years.

The world began to mechanize,
Introducing new commodity into industry,
Taking the nation by storm.
Ordinary tasks of the everyday,
Replaced by the new and improved.

The country land once so abundant,
Rapidly retreated out of sight.
What once was washed by hand,
Now was washed by machine.
Where once it was seen as a luxury,
Now a car was owned by all.
Advanced circuitry became household staples.