Frugal Living
"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
A former neighbor asked me the other day what was happening above the church I had attended as a child. The road the church was on was unpaved for a very long time and even after it was paved, there wasn’t much traffic and only one house and a barn below it. It was peaceful and the view of the mountain just up from it was one of my favorites.
The area I live in now is being developed or as James Taylor said in Copperline, “tore up and tore up good.” The developers can’t seem to leave a square inch of what was and have even torn down precious old homes and buildings because they meant nothing to the newcomers.
I did make the trip to see the old church and my heart was broken. That’s just the only way to say it. Bulldozers everywhere and dump trucks speeding and being overly aggressive on that peaceful little road. The whole sight made me sick.
I wondered what my great grandparents would think of all the destruction in the name of progress. It made me think of my Great Uncle Oscar Hicks. We called him Oss. He had a modest little house. You can see it in the picture.
The picture of him as a solider is from World War I and he did go and do his duty. After the war he had his mother and one or two sisters who lived there in that little house and eventually a niece. They had a huge garden each year. There was a barn, a pig pen, a corn crib just to name a few of the buildings.
They grew just about everything they needed. He grew peanuts every year and if you visited, you’d get some “parched” peanuts or around Halloween, he had a huge burlap sack full of candy. I still dream of the huge black cherries that hung on the tree in the back near the smoke house. He was a generous man.
The last picture shows him with one of his hogs. It appears to be early on in that hog’s life because the ones he raised grew fat - the hog in the picture hasn’t arrived at the prime time for being a country ham. Once the hog did fatten up and the cold weather came, Oss would kill the hog and others would help him process it. The hams would go into the smokehouse - the smokehouse that always smelled so good.
Right now most of what I buy comes from a store. Everything travels for miles and miles and by the time it reaches my table, there’s not much taste or nutrition left. I grew early peas last year and popped one in my mouth just off the vine. It was a religious experience! I know you hear this all the time but maybe we should choose a simpler way of living. Learn to use things up instead of running to the store to buy what we don’t really want or need. We should also stop making billlionaires richer.
The hundreds of self-storage units should show us that we are over consuming. I am good about some things but I realize now I need to be more mindful of using things and either giving them to others when I’ve finished with them or sometimes just deciding I really didn’t need something in the first place. The Japanese practice this and they call it the “Zero Waste Life.” They’re smart.
All these memories because of seeing my little home church being surrounded the other day. Some things hit hard.
