Waste not, want not . . .

Disposable? Not to her.

Nana’s tea towels had been washed and line dried so many times that they were soft as clouds and held as much water, not like the crisp ones with so much sizing and starch that call out from store shelves today. Bed sheets were much the same, perfumed from the fresh air where they blew free from fabric sheets or softeners.

Careful tiny stitches held fast the occasional patch, but throw them away? Not on your life.

I am sure a grandchild still has her tea can with the painted black, gold and white, faux-Asian motif, scratched and scarred from endless hands in and out for bags of Red Rose. Always it sat there on the shelf, just above and slightly left of the back burner of her stove, no newer or fancier a container ever considered.

Pyrex measuring cups – I wonder when those were invented? I know without hesitating that hers were the same ones from as far back as I can remember in the fifties until the time of her passing in 1998 with their barely visible red paint lines indicating the quantity in fractions of cups – no metric there! Nana’s cooking and baking were done with loving care with the same cookie sheets, pie plates and loaf pans she first had as a bride. When one of her daughters would offer to purchase a new set she wouldn’t hear of it. “Why, when I have perfectly good ones?”

Raising a family during the Depression meant everything had to be used until there was no more use to it, or it broke or plain wore out. Hers were not the only children who wore washed and sewn Four Roses or Purity flour bags as underpants or slips. Suits and overcoats were re-tailored under her skilful hands into dresses and coats for her girls.

Every scrap of wool yarn was used for socks or mitts and the remnant blended into still more. She knit some for my mother using the bits of orange left from one project to complete a brown pair she had been unable to complete. How Mom hated those ‘ugly’ mittens! One day when in a petulant fit, she put them on the chopping stump out back and took the axe to them, reducing them to scraps, and went home with the story that she had lost them. Grandmother knew better and found the evidence clinging in woolly shreds to the stump where a careless Alice had not sufficiently cleaned away the damning proof. Her punishment? No mittens for the rest of that winter. Old ones with holes were all mom could salvage from the bag of “ravels”, and those were her mittens the winter she was nine.

I hear my mother’s voice recounting this story to me at age 13 maybe as I bemoaned my sad fate at having to wear sensible waterproof winter boots when some of my friends were being allowed to wear more fashionable leather ones, tall with zippers on the side and form-fitting to the leg.

“You’ll be the only one with warm dry feet,” she said.

I’ll be the one with the dorky boots, I thought.

“And don’t try losing them. I tried that trick once . . .” and she launched into the tale of the brown and orange mittens.

Nana’s thrift and wisdom made her both an icon for the three Rs movement, and the cause for much sighing as those left to clean out her home asked, “Did she throw anything out?” While I am determined not to be wasteful, and I know better than to hoard things for someday, I could take a few more lessons from my grandmother on how to walk a finer balance in this disposable society we live in.