I thought I understood frugality...

I just finished a book called, Little Heathens, written by a woman very close to my parent's ages. The language was a bit crude in parts (and a few F words that you can easily avoid as they are well announced), but I found it to be a trip down the memory lane of my parents' early life: outhouses, no refrigeration, horses, chickens, milking cows, canning, and lots of Yankee ingenuity.

Here is a quote from the book:

“We were taught that if you bought something it should last forever—or as close to
forever as we could contrive. I think one of the cleverest tricks was how we extended the lives of socks. When the socks of the biggest child developed holes in the toes, Grandma, using her dressmaker’s shears, would cut off the end, sew it closed on the sewing machine, and pass the socks down to the child next in size. When the socks developed holes again, she would repeat this until the sock had been passed down to the child with the smallest foot. You think that was the end of those socks? “Not on your tintype!” as she would have put it. She cut the ribbed tops off of those socks and they did duty sewn into the ends of sleeves of fall and winter jackets and coats to keep out the bitter cold.

“Of course, there were times when the socks developed holes in the heels. This repair called for painstaking darning, always done by females and nearly always done during their so called leisure time. But there was a limit to how often socks could be darned, and when they had been “all darned out” we were resourceful to the end. We cut them into small squares and tossed them into the shoe-shine box to be used for buffing cloths. Or we cut them lengthwise into two-inch widths and clamped them into the reusable mop handle designed for this purpose.

*****

She talks about using her finger to remove all the residual egg white from an egg. I have seen some frugal behavior in my time, but I've never seen anyone do that. I've been wanting to try it to see if it would even yield much, but I can't ever remember to try it.

After breakfast, my Grandmother Hurst used to dump all of the half finished glasses of orange juice back into the pitcher saying "These have hardly been touched." My Dad was frugal (saving every screw, remnant of wood, and piece of rope that crossed his path), but we weren't so frugal we recycled orange juice.

They rarely got store-bought food, but when they did, they even enjoyed the packaging. They wrapped their sandwiches for school lunch in wax paper they took from the inner sack of a cereal box. Each day they would fold it up for reuse the next day.

In the book, she talks about treating a cut by wrapping it with a spiderweb, using ear wax to sooth a bee sting, using a drying egg white to extract a sliver. She gives lots of recipes too. I found myself remembering so many things I have been told about life in the 1930's and things I saw at the old homestead.