When you’re ten years old, you know things about the world, but you don’t know how to interpret them correctly or put them in the right context. At this age, my cousin had just moved out to a land far and unknown to me: Tennessee. The life experiences of ten-year-old me were limited to a small island in the Caribbean, that although being a territory of the United States, was and still is a whole other world to the mainland. On this small island, our connection to the natural world is all-inclusive: the treefrogs that sings named themselves with the “co-quí, co-quí”, the ocean waves communicate their next move even with your eyes closed and underwater, and the land screams for help when it is dirtied by humans. I knew what littering was from a very young age, and would practically shoot lasers out of my eyes when I would hear cars zooming past and leaving their unwanted remnants on the street, or worse, on the grass and sand. If I already understood the dangers and horrific nature of the actions of people three times my age, why couldn’t they? In my mind it was simple: littering = bad. But there are some places where littering = good, and that place was at a peanut restaurant in Clarksville, Tennessee. As I walked into the warmth of that southern peanut restaurant on a cold winter day, my mind slowly started processing my surroundings. We were guided to our table, where we were thrown right into the middle of chaos and madness. Mountains and mountains of peanut shells had taken over what was once floors, and I barely had time to understand what was happening before my aunt took her first bite. She crushed the shell of a peanut, laughing hysterically at my face, and threw it to the ground. I tried to warn her that she was littering, but she would not listen. Soon enough, my entire family began to crush shells and throw them to the ground, crush shells and throw them to the ground, over and over and over again. They didn’t understand that the more they littered, the more hurt nature would be, and I had to do something to stop them. I could not watch the littering unfold any longer. I stood on the table, pointed at my aunt, and screamed at the top of my lungs: “LITTERER! LITTERER”. The manager came over to tame my fury, but little did he know I was prepared to refute every one of his claims, with my unwavering determination and sense of justice to save the Earth. My actions that day in Tennessee did nothing to change the peanut restaurant, as it still encourages its customers to crush peanuts and little to this day. Moreso, the story of the little girl who gave the manager a lesson on littering is still told at every employee training. There is a picture of me screaming, hung up somewhere in Tennessee, and I am proud to say that (although originally misguided), that ten-year-old part of me that screams for justice is still alive within me.
