2002-08-07 - 8:26 p.m.
I finished my lunch and carefully smoothed out the piece of aluminum foil that had enclosed my pretzels, and folded it in thirds. Still usable. Oh, there I go again....being Miss Great Depression. That was way before my time, but so many little habits seem to run in families, as persistently as freckles or brown eyes.
My mother was born into a big family (six kids) that somehow managed to survive on a little 80 acre farm and Grandpa's WPA job. Thrift and frugality were not a matter of principle, they were absolute necessities. Grandma grew and canned all their own food, made flour sack dresses, quilts and pretty much anything else they needed. She worked hard all her life, taking care of others, and never changed her ways. I always called it depression thinking, because I've seen it in everyone who was old enough to remember those days: apparently once you have experienced total economic collapse and the scarcity of all necessities, abundance was never to be trusted.
If there was a tablespoon of corn left over after a meal, Grandma would carefully transfer it to a tiny dish and store it in the refrigerator until the next meal. Then out it would come, reheated and served. She made creative use of the plastic bags in which beans and macaroni were packaged by carefully slitting them down the side to make a square sheet of plastic and then using that to cover bowls, secured by rubber bands. Cereal box liners were saved for the wax paper, and of course all manner of foil, string, boxes, jars and coffee cans found other uses as well. Writing was always done on scrap paper, usually the reverse side of saved junk mail; good paper was reserved for letters.
Not long ago I unframed an old family photo that had belonged to Grandma and there, instead of a mat, were little strips of brown paper that looked like they had been part of a notebook cover, secured to the picture with tiny pieces of tape. Everything, even masking tape, was a precious commodity.
Sewing was where she really shone. She could always make a garment from less material than the pattern called for by creative piecing, smaller facings, scrap linings, etc. Warm, heavy quilts were created from old woolen coats, and the smaller scraps were turned into hooked rugs. She could unravel an old sweater and use the yarn to make mittens. Garments could be disassembled and remodeled, and even the thread would be saved and wrapped around a matchbook for later use.
And whatever she made, she carefully saved every little scrap of leftover fabric and folded it all together into a neat little bundle and tied the bundle with a thin strip of selvedge. All of the bundles were stored in a big wooden chest.... like a pirate's treasure, I used to think. Stored against the time when there would be no fabric and something could be made from even the smallest scrap. Although I doubt she even thought about it after a while. She just knew that it was good to save and bad to waste, and that was the way she lived. She made incredible doll clothes from that fabric collection when I was little as well as lots of clothes for her granddaughters. She was generous with her time and talent, but she tried to live in such a way that money was never spent.
This was the world my mother grew up in and she learned those lessons well. And yet she made a conscious effort to be different. She didn't save plastic bags or mayonnaise jars or tiny dabs of food. She hates to sew. Especially in later life, she has readily indulged in large and small pleasures that Grandma would have thought excessive: eating in restaurants, travel, nice clothes. But the depression still runs deeply in the details of life. She turns bottles of catsup and hand lotion upside down to get the last little bit, and rolls the toothpaste tubes and presses bits of soap together. She still has that resourcefulness.... when I visit she proudly shows me how she has invented or repaired or rigged up something to solve a problem.
These qualities have survived another generation. I find myself doing some of the same things. I'm half proud of my "Scotch" heritage, feeling that it served me well in hard times. Like my mother and grandmother, I never let being poor keep me from having what I wanted. I don't think I will ever fully engage in the consumer society as it is now defined, because I will always question the necessity of having more than I need. I have had too little, so it is easy to recognize enough.
But partly it is a little annoying, because I don't have to live that way anymore, and all of that reflexive saving and futzing around with little insignificant things is time consuming, and can get in the way of doing bigger things that are more important. As somebody once said, the problem with being poor is that it takes up all your time. And the problem with living like you are poor when you don't have to, is that the time is wasted. I can afford to throw away a piece of aluminum foil every day of my life, and probably a zip-lock bag, too. I can afford to throw away an inch of shampoo in the bottom of a bottle, or even the whole bottle if I don't like it. I have to stop myself from being too careful and thinking of things as too precious.
This morning I pointed out to Skootie that she had opened the new mayonnaise jar before finishing the old one, and she teased me about it. She will cheerfully pitch anything she doesn't like, and open a new jar just because it is more appealing than the old one. We do have fundamentally different ways of doing things. But, I admire her lack of attachment to consumer products and try to remember to emulate it. You just can't care about everything.
My grandmother was once a creative and artistic young woman who spent her life using her talents to make ends meet, to take care of other people. Not that taking care of others is an unworthy goal. But when she died, I was the recipient of boxes and boxes of little bundles of fabric scraps. All so carefully assembled and saved. And I tried to put some of them to use, just out of respect for her, but in total it represented so much effort spent for so little. I want to leave more than that behind. When I leave this life, I want my family to have lots of my art and writing to remember me by, instead of foil and string and fabric scraps. I don't want to be remembered as the person who never wasted mayonnaise.
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