It's a late winter morning and I am donning the barn suit, an old set of coveralls possibly dating from the seventies that I inherited from my father. I'm heading to the barn to feed horses. The nights are still long, and I don't like to make them wait until daylight for their breakfast. Life is simple in this dark, quiet time before the sunrise and its concomitant pressure to get stuff done, and delivering a few books of hay and a fresh bucket of water brings complete satisfaction, both to myself and the equines.
Though not always by choice, it's been a lifelong quest of mine to figure out how to buy little or nothing and still accomplish my goals, which is one reason you'll find me doing chores in vintage clothing. I believe myself to be better equipped than most to give advice on living simply with less buying, and credit for this ability goes to my parents. Indelibly marked by the Great Depression and still impressionable when World War II came along, they were stoic survivors who constantly prepared for the worst. The fact that they both emerged from German/Scotch-Irish hill folk meant they never bought on credit (or in my father’s case never at all if avoidable), and rarely threw anything away. When the ketchup got low, my mother rinsed out the bottle to make sloppy Joe sauce. We used tea towels made from flour sacks which I still have. My dad never purchased lumber, but used ripped-up pallets for all his building needs. When we cleaned out a barn he had used for storage, we found parts of eight push mowers and one motorcycle, still waiting to be reassembled and put to use.
For the most part, I dislike the trend of partitioning the population by generations. It facilitates division, with Millennials blaming Boomers for the world’s problems, and vice versa, while Generation X'ers stand quietly off to the side, trying not to be noticed. Though such delineations oversimplify a complicated reality, some differences are real. For my father (Greatest Generation) and mother (very early Silent Generation) thrift was virtuous. My mother didn't save bacon grease because we were poor. My father didn't have 15 salvaged paintbrushes hanging on hooks in his utility shed because he had hoarding disorder (though this is debatable.) They did these things because it was a moral imperative. To waste was wrong, and they upheld this truth with religious fervor in their daily practices.
My family's financial well-being did not hinge on banking every spare penny and saving buttons before turning an old shirt into quilt squares or rags, but my parents continued habits of thrift well past the point of necessity. Because it was a matter of morality, they didn't just chuck it when it was no longer a matter of survival. Through a combination of natural inclination and constant inculcation, I became like my parents. I always felt different in school and looking back I realize I was in a fundamental way.
As offspring of much younger parents (late Silent Generation to very early Boomer) my classmates seemed almost of another culture. They lived in split-level ranch homes with wall to wall carpeting, rather than an ancient and drafty re-purposed church with homemade braided rag rugs, but the real difference was much deeper. At home they threw away perfectly good food and left the water running while they brushed their teeth. Their families spent lots of money, but also apparently had financial problems, a situation that was puzzling to me as a child.
As I grew up I realized profligacy was the norm, and that I truly was different from many of my contemporaries. I was already muttering “Kids these days” when I was still a kid myself. Of course, there are people like me of all ages who practice domestic austerity, and many who could tell tales of childhood privations imaginatively remedied by parents on a tight budget. I’m guessing if you're reading this you're more mindful of waste than average and do your best to practice the three R's (reduce, reuse, recycle). You probably challenge the notion of spending freely to keep the economy healthy and the wheels of commerce turning. But we are the minority — the majority simply acquire and discard without much thought beyond not getting ripped off.
So here I am in middle age writing about how my parents had things right, and how we need to get back to the old ways. Perhaps this is cliche, but that doesn't bother me. People of my parents’ generations had less, but valued it more and made do. Getting back to this way of being may soon become a matter of survival. It would be best to start now and get into the habit before there's no other option.
In the past when a friend threw away a blouse because a button came off, I said nothing. I also kept quiet when dining companions declined to have uneaten portions boxed up because they didn't eat leftover food. Although such actions flabbergasted me, it seemed pointless to criticize. But more and more I feel the need to speak up. So in the future if you see someone on a street corner in a faded but very mod barn suit, standing on a vintage soapbox with a sign reading, “You're doing it wrong!” it just might be me. Please heed my words, and think about what you really need to survive and thrive, and throw a penny in my repurposed cottage cheese container before you pass on by.
This is so good.