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The Oma Lifestyle™

Amy Jarrett

The word sustainability is thrown around like confetti these days. Every company has picked up on the buzzword and tweaked their products and marketing accordingly. Some genuinely, and some by some weird greenwashing we are led to believe the same product and production process has magically morphed into “sustainable” practices simply because the word appears on websites or packaging. It’s everywhere you can imagine.  And yet this month, as we celebrate my husband’s grandma’s 90th birthday I am reminded of a conversation she and I had the last time we visited. It seems the term sustainability isn’t one quite everyone has heard. 

Oma has lived in the same tiny village her whole life. She lived through the American occupation during World War ll. Similar to most other near-90 year olds, she’s allergic to technology, and is therefore exposed to very few buzzwords, except from the bees in her garden who buzz words but in a different way. 

On our last visit, Oma, gracious as she is, asked me what it is I do. I would like to give her due credit here, as I am sure there is lots about me Oma does not understand. My native tongue, for one. (side note: a particularly warm memory of this visit was the way I made Oma laugh out loud by detailing all the ways I am able to butcher German - ways she never dreamed possible.) Oma never traveled far from home, met and married a foreign man, made her money with music and creativity, or lived in a van for a time. So bless her truly, for endeavoring to know me better. 

One thing I don’t have to explain to Oma is how much I love to sew. Oma sews her own clothes and sewed clothing for her four children. I have inherited piles of interesting fabric from her and we chat about sewing, easy peasy. But when I told Oma that I have my own “sustainable” label, she gave me a look as blank as a fresh sheet of printer paper. Of course I didn’t use the English word ‘‘sustainable,’’ because Oma doesn’t speak English. “Nachhaltig,” I said, staring at Oma for a hint of recognition for the word I was using to describe not only my upcycling business, but also the fair fashion shop I manage and what I aspire to as a lifestyle in general. Oma never told me outright she didn’t understand what in the what I was talking about, but given her expression, I started to explain it to her anyway. “It’s where you reuse old materials however you can, so they still have a life and a purpose. You repair things that can be repaired. You try not to live wastefully, and you try think about how your choices could affect nature.” Oma probably thought I was talking crazy, but she didn’t say much. 

I looked at her for a long time and went over all the stories she had told us in my head. How when she was a girl her father used to go to the neighbors to trade goods, no cash involved. How the house she lives in is built from locally sourced materials, just like the entire village. How up until a few years ago she had still sewn her own blouses.  How she has grown her own food all her life; right up to age 89 she has planted and harvested plentiful gardens, complete with wildflower patches for the buzzing bumble bees. In her childhood food wasn’t over-abundant but she never remembers being hungry. Bananas had not yet entered Germany. Nothing was imported. The carbon footprint of her life must be minuscule, and to her it’s a given. All the ways she lives sustainably are all ways we, two generations down the road, must make conscious efforts to incorporate into our lives. It is amazing to me how we have basically taken Oma’s  lifestyle and branded it. People of her generation (and of course generations prior) didn’t need to live by a mantra of sustainability or put extra effort into saving the bees or need environmental encouragement to sew their own clothes. Every simplistic factor of her life that we now commercialize has been a very authentic representation of how people used to live. Simply, economically, environmentally friendly, wasting little. It’s reality that we now need to commercialize Oma’s lifestyle. It’s reality that within a few generations we have pushed the planet to its brink. We now need to work collectively and mindfully. We now need buzzwords to help us talk about what’s happening and what we can do about it. But our grandmothers didn’t need those words, because they simply embodied the practices and ideals. For them, it was out of necessity. But isn’t it out of necessity for us too? Maybe a different kind of necessity, but necessity nonetheless.

I was so thankful for this conversation with Oma. It re-inspired the Oma in me…. the one who plants her own garden and sews curtains out of old tableclothes and dresses out of old curtains. I acknowledge that our world now is different and we can only let the lifestyle of yore inspire us. We have to take what we can and apply it to our own lives, but of course we cannot apply everything about the Oma Lifestyle™ to our daily lives today because the world is a very different place. We can’t go back in time. But we can take with us the practices that we find meaning in, like using and re-using materials to the end of their lifecycle, living as locally as we can, maybe growing our own food or supporting local farmers who grow food, maybe even trading skills or goods locally and leaving currency out of it altogether ….(is that illegal? and do I like it more if it is?)

I am going to take a leaf out of Oma’s book. Instead of seeing the world of sustainability as a buzzword I want to look at it more as given; a natural way of life. I want to take what I can from past generations: living thoughtfully, practically, and potentially illegally. To incorporate what is possible to incorporate into my own life, using the skills I have to do so. Everyone’s skills will be different, and so that will look different for everybody. But we can all start there, just like our grandma’s and grandpa’s generations did…The original Oma Lifestylers™. Bzzzzzz