In the spirit of Earth Day, I’d like to give a “shout-out” to my late grandparents, Donald and Xarreffa Fuller of Anderson.

My grandma was an eco-pioneer, and didn’t even know it. She composted the kitchen scraps in her garden. Instead of soda, she brewed sweet tea. Rather than give you a polycarbonate cup made of bisphenol A, Grandma Fuller would offer you a renewable glass container (she called it a “Mason jar.”)

She dried her clothes with passive solar — a clothesline — and she recycled her children’s clothes (when my dad, Estan Lee, was done with them, then my uncles John, Larry, David, Paul, Lymon and aunts Jo, Esther, Marty, Phyllis and Jan wore ’em.)

Grandma Fuller raised chickens, gathered the eggs and didn’t inject the feed with hormones and antibiotics. Wow.

My grandparents conceived 12 kids in Anderson, 11 of whom lived, without expensive fertility technology.

Grandma used cloth diapers.

Like many Anderson residents back then, my Grandma Fuller didn’t have to buy produce that was shipped a thousand miles by truck. She grew tomatoes, squash, green beans and watermelon herself, and they were delicious. (When was the last time you had a good watermelon?)

Even my grandfather Don Fuller was a rabid environmentalist. Sometimes, he’d “harvest renewable water species using environmentally friendly technology, prepared with traditional cultural methods.”

But he called it “catching some catfish and having a fish fry.”

Yep, my grandparents were really out of control! How I miss them.

Leslie Fuller Knox

Peotone, Ill.