kukla_tko | Story time...

cuglas posted a bit about used clothing avalable for a few dollars a pound. She mentioned that she is decended from generations of dumpster divers and trash pickers.

I had to sound off.

Me, too, Me, too!

My Maternal Grandmother grew up during the Depression.
She has some very bizarre behaviors including (but not limited to): some odd food combinations, cutting open the toothpaste tube to scrape out the last bits of paste, adding things like water and V8 juice to ketchup and spaghetti sauce to "stretch" it, and her inability to get rid of anything unless she sells it at a garage sale. And anything left over from a sale... she keeps.
As a child and a teenager, I remember her collections of margarine tubs, plastic ziplock bags, reused aluminum foil, etc.
She cries during food commercials sometimes, because she knows how much food is wasted filming them. There’s an old family joke about Grandma’s cooking. One will often hear her say, “Oh, no. These mushrooms are going bad. We had better eat them today.”
Going bad? Then THROW THEM OUT, GRANDMA!

Her mother was a painter who had to re-use her canvases in order to keep painting. There's a family heirloom that Mom has put a bid on, it's a simple painting of a barn, but on the back there seems to be a second painting of men's feet. It seems that Great-grandma painted a mural sized picture depicting the quiet desperation and struggling hope of the new deal work groups. She entered it in a local contest (the contest may have been how she acquired the large canvas) and won. The picture was depicted in the newspaper and she won a cash prize.

A few years later, out of money and out of canvas... she cut the large picture into smaller pieces of canvas, re-stretched them backwards onto new frames and painted new paintings on the other side. Most of them she sold for food money.
(shudder.) As I am both working poor and an artist, this story chills me to the bone.

On my father's side, not only did my grandparents grow up in the depression... they were raising 10 kids on a teacher's salary. So, once again... reuse, recycle, and think outside the box. To this day, Papa prefers to have his meat out in the open where he can see it. That comes from years of strange casseroles and soups where one was really lucky to get a bit of meat with one’s meal. He eats roasts, steaks, pork chops, bacon, but no Spaghetti, meatloaf, casseroles, or the like. Meat. Potatoes. Salad. All separate and visible.

Some of my fondest memories from my childhood are of going dumpster diving with my father. Once, he took us to the dump, and we had a really fun time. Papa won't throw anything away, either. He reuses Cheez-it and Cereal boxes as Magazine holders for his Scientific American, National Geographic, and Math geek publications. He reuses the bottoms of milk cartons to hold disks, tools, nails, etc. He makes filters and funnels out of old plastic bottles.
Over the years, at both the house I grew up in and his current residence, he has gotten complaints and petitions against the way he keeps his property.
It does NOT look like a city dump. It does NOT look like a huge trash pile. But he does pile all the scraps and salvaged building materials in neat stacks all over his yard. He stores his ladders, scaffolding, and hand-made trailers in his driveway next to the garage. He keeps his vehicles in the driveway, too, since the garage is filled with his tools, materials, and projects. When he lived alone, he had the saw room, the library, the dining nook and the three rooms full of shelves packed to bursting with tools, fittings, nails, screws, bolts, electronic parts, and other random bits. (Most of which were stored in reused packages from any number of random things.

So, after reading

cuglas's journal…
I started drooling, too.
Except that I am trying to get outside this mentality, myself...

I don't have the space to store all this crap!!!