Dear ,
I was raised by parents who were both scared (and scarred) by the Great
Depression. My father was the only son of an Ohio farmer who died when
he was 17, leaving my dad as the man of the house and man of the farm.
My mother was the youngest of a family of eight kids and her father
died when she was a baby, leaving my Grandma a widow, to raise and
feed, if you can imagine, eight children from the age of 18 years to
18 months, (without Costco!) and amidst the Depression. Both of my
parents grew up poor although I never heard them describe it that way.
My parents' childhood activities, to my teenage kids, sound
prehistoric. I might as well mention dinosaurs when I talk about how my
Dad baled hay, milked cows and tended the hen house and how he spent
the 3 hours before and after school, not playing soccer or X-Box, but
doing farm chores. As I read that back to myself, it sounds prehistoric
to me! My dad really did walk 3 miles to school, as annoying as that
was to hear all throughout my own childhood. My mother still talks of
homeless people she called hobos, who'd come to their backdoor with
their hat in hand and ask for something to eat. Grandma Wilson would
leave a sandwich or whatever she could skim from the already limited
kitchen supplies for them to eat on the back porch swing. The JC Penney
catalog was "recycled"- in the outhouse- in ways I'm sure Mr. Penney
never intended and I still remember Grandma eating the core of the
apple (!) and preferring the heel of the bread loaf, although I now
suspect that she'd eaten the heel, the wing, the burnt piece, for so
many decades that it was a reflexive choice. My mother was way ahead of
her time when it came to not wasting ANYthing. She was the world's best
recycler before the word "recycle" had ever been invented. Along with
my four siblings, I remember that Mom could never throw out an aluminum
pie tin (the cupboards avalanched them if you opened a door too fast).
She rinsed out baggies for re-use and even folded up gently used
tinfoil if it appeared to have some life left. Leftovers were
progressively re-served at each meal and stored in smaller and smaller
containers even if there were only two bites left. To this day in a
restaurant, Mom will ask the waiter for a doggie bag and often has to
point to the small bites of left-over food to prove to the waiter
there's actually something on the plate worth taking home; "Here! Wrap
up this one bite, here!" Cake batter bowls were barely worth licking
after my mother scraped it bare.
Waste was a sin in my parent's book and this was a permanent part of their psyche as unchangeable as their skin color.
Throughout my 20's and 30's, I made a point of what I now recognize as
"uncycling", simply because I'd had enough of my parents' conservative
lifestyle. What for them was a survival mode now appeared to my
generation as cheapskate. I never took so much as a sweet-n-low packet
from a restaurant (unlike Mom, God bless her) not to mention that
doggie bags embarrassed me too much to ask for one.
No tinfoil, bag or baggie survived more than one use(READ MORE)
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