Help I’ve Turned into my Grandmother

When my husband and I were in our first year of marriage we would often drive down to the Ozarks and visit relatives. When visiting grandma, we would often snicker that grandma was getting a little eccentric. Grin, she had some quirks.
     There was that thing about her front door. It was uncovered and always faced the brunt of any storms approaching, so needless to say, it needed painting every year. Grandma had watched a science show on TV about acid rains, so of course it needed to be painted because of the acid rains that frequented her part of the Ozarks.
     Being frugal, she washed her plastic food bags and reused them. She recycled before it was in vogue.
     Then there was the water, Grandma heard about the boil water order posted for her town, but I guess she never heard when the OK was issued. 5 years later she was still boiling. After she passed on some county officials did a water test on a local sewer system and put some dye in it, guess what the dye showed up in the local streams and drinking water.
     Grandma had become a “vegetarian”. Organic peanut butter and green onions for breakfast? For her being a vegetarian was probably more of a financial statement than a lifestyle statement. But my cousins often regaled us of stories about going out to eat with grandma and watching the other restaurant patrons quietly put down their forks after grandma had loudly and adamantly regaled those at the table with information on the inhumane treatment of meat animals and information on stockyards.
    Every morning my Grandmother always took a nice “healthy walk” down the country road in front of her house. The Ozarks were also receiving the benefits of her “healthy walk”. She collected bags and bags of road side trash while walking.

Of course back in the eighties Grandma seemed very eccentric. But as I drink my filtered tap water, watch http://planetgreen.discovery.com/ on TV and finish putting together my homemade version of a countertop plastic bag dryer I realize that I’ve turned into my grandma.