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 “Use
it up…wear it out...make it do…or do without.” Words I grew up with
and by which I raised my kids. Every season people want to buy brand
new clothes. Appliances are manufactured as throw aways, not
something you can repair. Those old Coppertone refrigerators of the
70’s are still plugging away while today’s fridges barely last three
or four years.
Some time or other each of us has come to a point in our lives where
we have had to figure out how to control our spending. It usually
isn’t that we have plunged into life unaware that consuming has
consequences, but rather life has decided to pile more troubles upon
on us than we know what to do with.
It is usually at this exact time that we develop exaggerated pride
and paranoia and think we’ve seized the wrong day. We need to
readjust our thinking and realize we do still have the commonsense
God gave a goose and to start using it.
When we were kids back on the farm we liked playing sports. It never
occurred to us that we needed proper sporting equipment. The back 40
had a slough that would freeze over in the wintertime. We’d don our
snow clothes, divide into teams, search for good sturdy sticks,
stack frozen cow pies in a pile and get ready to play hockey. No
skates, just our boots slipping and sliding on the ice. That frozen
manure was hard as a rock, and we had the best puck ever. Many a
winter went by before we realized what we were doing without and
shouldn’t have been having that much fun.
Summer was the same. Rather than frozen dung we had dried out guano.
We used them as bases. We never thought twice about them being
disgusting. They were there, they were plentiful, and they worked.
We tried old magazines as bases, and they would slip and slide as we
slid into them. The cow pies were, once again, hard as rocks and not
only stayed put but would last through several innings.
Another beautiful cow pie memory is Mother and I would gather a load
of hardened pies in the ubiquitous farm kid’s red wagon each spring.
She’d help me load and I would pull as she gathered her store-bought
petunias, geraniums, etc. We would proceed to the mailbox by the
road, and I would shovel dung, then dirt, then plant the flowers. We
had the most gorgeous mailbox on Yankee Lane. (In my child’s mind at
least) We’d proceed back to the house yard and plant any remaining
flowers and then fertilize the day lilies, the peonies, and whatever
blossoms my sister had planted. I loved those days.
One piece of advice this farm girl will tell you is that it is
unwise to crawl up a pile of manure in the winter. The outside is
strong and frozen, but the compost heat will always simmer and brew
from within and sooner or later even the smallest child will fall
through and learn the lesson of decomposing under aerobic
conditions. But I digress. Oh, but wait. Before I stop talking about
pooh…. make sure you know what type of animal manure you use. Each
species of beast produces a different type of waste. Some will
absolutely burn your flora. Do your homework.
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How many of you remember putting plastic bread bags over your socks
before you put your boots on? Not only did it keep your feet warmer,
but it also made taking your boots off ever so much easier. Socks
stayed on. Boots were easily removed. Should have been the perfect
solution for one and all. Even now I remember sitting on the school
coat room floor and being pointed at and teased about wearing bread
wrappers on my feet. I. Was. Humiliated. I never wore them to school
again. Upon reflection, I wonder why kicking my boots off, having my
socks stay inside said boots, digging them out, standing barefoot on
one leg wresting on the socks while being pushed and shoved on all
sides while other kids did the same thing was less humiliating. It
was one of my first lessons of peer pressure not always being the
right thing to do.
Online, “If your peers tell you to resist peer pressure…...is that
peer pressure?”
Spring is coming…….I promise! Mushroom hunting will be here before
you know it. Save those mesh produce bags. Use them to collect
mushrooms. The mesh will allow dirt to fall through while enabling
spores to produce back into the forest. It’s better than a “Two
for”. You get to reuse a bag, replenish mother nature, get your
exercise, eat delicious mushrooms, and have bragging rights of
ecological wisdom.
“What made the mushroom farmer a good person? He had really good
morels.” Scary Mommy.
What really confounds me today is the expensive jeans people buy
that are already ripped. When I was young, this would have been
beyond mortifying. Nobody patches jeans anymore. Poor Mother was
constantly at the sewing machine mending and patching. All the kids
wore mended jeans to school. It was normal. Now people buy ripped
jeans and scorn patches. My question to today’s moms is…. If your
child gets a hole in their new ripped jeans, do you get upset when
they tear these jeans?
I was brought up with “Eat it or go hungry”. There were no
substitutes. No apology. No concern I would miss a meal. I carried
that on with my children. Having five boys, it really wasn’t a
problem. They almost ate the pattern off my plates.
“People who love to eat are always the best people.” Julia Child.
Don’t make the “use it up/wear it out/make it do/or do without” a
despised mantra of the 30’s. Make it a part of your everyday story.
Life is short. “Happiness isn’t wanting what you don’t have, it’s
wanting what you do have.”
L. Maxine McQueen may be contacted at
maxmac.1@juno.com
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