Just a few weeks ago, I went to a family reunion at my grandparents’ farm in Mississippi. It was one of those reunions with long tables full of food and third cousins you’ve never met, lots of iced sweet tea and babies on blankets in the yard and your great-aunt asking about a sibling you don’t have… “No, really, Great Aunt Tillie, I just have one brother. I promise.”
My grandparents – all four of them – grew up in the Depression, worked hard, and made comfortable lives for themselves. My mother’s parents are the ones with the farm. My Grandpa started out small and farmed cotton and soybeans. He worked hard, saved money, and now he has a 1000-acre farm that he rents out while he sits in his air-conditioned antique shop and sips his Diet Coke.
At the farm, they keep a bucket with a wooden spoon in it in the cabinet underneath the sink. Every uneaten scrap of food goes in that bucket, and at the end of the day two or three or four eager farm dogs consume it. They like it lots better than their dog food, which they still get, but it’s never enough to make them sick.
My father’s parents worked together for years in my Granddad’s shop. He was an optician, and after their children were all in school my Grandmom worked behind the counter, waited on customers, and kept things neat. They were retired before I was born, and bought a comfortable house on three acres and kept themselves busy with a garden way too big for our entire extended family.
Both my father’s parents have passed on now, and when we were cleaning out their house we found stacks and stacks of cool whip, margarine, and sour cream containers. We always joked about how Grandmom never threw anything away, but then we went out to the shed and discovered it was actually Granddad. Every tool he’d ever bought was there, pieces of twine were hanging on the wall to be used again, and still-straight nails removed from boards and fence posts were waiting in those old yellow margarine containers.
I find it amusing when my generation gives itself a pat on the back for being so earth-conscious and sustainable. The truth is, we’re just coming back around to doing things in a common-sense way, the way our grandparents did for years just because it made sense. It made sense to save things you could use again instead of throwing them out and buying more. It made sense to reuse. It made sense to find a use for old food besides the trash can and to let random pieces of twine live out their full usefulness. Good for us for starting to figure this stuff out, too. Let’s not forget where we first saw it.
Image Credit: Seattle Municipal Archives.
