I dedicate this post to my mother, who when raising me in the late 60′s and 70′s, managed to balance her proper lady tendencies with care for the environment, experimentation with yoga, and do it yourself quilting and macrame.

I was raised during a time when my mother insisted that we don our best dress for air travel, learned the proper way to serve guests during dinner parties, and only wear white between Memorial Day and Labor Day. My mother didn’t buy a lot of expensive clothes for herself but she invested in handbags and shoes from the best Italian purveyors and made sure that they matched.

Somehow, she managed to balance her proper upbringing with the emerging trends of the times of recycling and care for the environment. I grew up in the age of the iconic TV ad of the Native American in traditional garb paddling his canoe through the polluted stream. So she taught us to do our share to be part of the solution. Every weekend, we would load up the station wagon and head to the municipal dump to recycle. And she was very proud of her early decision to do all of the laundry with cold water.

I’ve got to admit that I’ve had my struggles with laundry. Growing up with everything washed in cold, I had a few misadventures (lots of whites that are now gray, blue, or pink) when striking out on my own in a world where folks sort their whites, brights, and in betweens and wash clothes in hot or warm in addition to cold.

When I participated in P&G Future Friendly with SheSpeaks last year, I made the decision to follow my mother’s wisdom and return to washing everything in cold. In addition to saving money and energy, it’s made our laundry routine easier with skipping the sorting and no inadvertent whites turning other colors. That’s why I am delighted that Tide is now offering a full line of laundry detergents designed for cold water washing and that I had the opportunity to sample the Fresh Scent Tide Coldwater with my family thanks to P&G and SheSpeaks. I hope this means that washing in cold water is becoming as “au courant” as my Mom’s excellent choice of shoes and bags.