Stories & Recipes
The Culling
Nobody goes natural overnight, it takes time to figure out what needs replacing and how to replace it, but the day I count as my real beginning was in 2008, the day of the culling.
I was feeling so sick that day, queasy with a headache, and I was so tired of feeling bad all the time, of never having any fun and never being any fun because I never felt well enough to do anything. I was standing in the bathroom, holding onto the edge of the counter top and feeling the next thing to despair, wondering, “What is it? What is wrong with me?”
And then I just knew that I was poisoned. Mildly, but for a long time, and my body couldn’t take it anymore. It was as though I downloaded the information, it was just there, and I knew it was true. Suddenly I was aware of the overwhelming chemical smell in the room. A minute ago, I wasn’t aware of any smell at all, but now I’m choking on it. I stumbled out of the room and went to the kitchen sink to splash water on my face, but the smell was there, too, and I couldn’t stand it. I went outside and sat on the steps and breathed in the pines and breathed out that smell and thought about what to do.
There was really only ever one option, one thing that could be done, that had to be done, so it wasn’t that I was trying to figure out what to do, so much as I was just trying to accept what I must do. I didn’t want to waste so much of anything and I didn’t want to throw a bunch of plastic and chemicals into a landfill somewhere, but I also didn’t want to pass along my unwanted poisons to my friends, so disposing of it all was going to be a challenge, but I knew it had to be done. From one day to the next, from one *minute* to the next, I could not live with those chemicals in my house.
So I got a big box from the garage and dragged it from bathroom to bathroom and through the kitchen, pulling every cleaning product from under every sink, stacking neatly at first, arranging, but then piling more in the box and wedging still more in the crevices. Gary, my husband, came upstairs while I was doing all this. He listened to my story and, to his credit, didn’t argue with me about it at all, he just said, “Ok, then,” and carted that fully loaded box off to the garage.
I opened the windows and ran fans throughout the house to clear out the chemical smell. It was a lot better by the time I went to bed that night. I slept better than I had in weeks. I got up the next morning, went into the bathroom and realized that every personal care product in the room reeked of chemicals. I couldn’t smell them until the stronger cleaning chemicals were gone, but now they’re filling the room.
I knew it all had to go, but it was *so* much harder to say goodbye to all my lovely lotions and bath salts, makeup and perfume. I’ve never been such a girly girl as to wear makeup every day, but it was still hard to let it go. I love my baths and all my lovely bath things, but they had to go because I could no longer abide the smell of any of it.
So I got another box from the garage.
