What was once weird seems smart again

When I was fresh out of law school, I returned to my hometown of Orlando to help my parents move my grandmother out of her assisted living apartment and into the nursing home next door. Her Alzheimer's had progressed to the point that she could not be counted upon to feed and clothe herself regularly or to spend her days without risking injuries to herself. Five years before, my parents had flown to Sun City, Arizona to prepare to pare down her five bedroom house full of antiques and memories into just enough stuff to cram into that one bedroom apartment, and they had spent a week doing battle with her over the things she couldn't bear to part with. Even then, she had still brought so much extra furniture and "stuff" to her 250 sq. ft existence that much of it had to be stored in the purgatory of my parents' garage, since my grandmother refused to give it up but there simply was no place to put it in her jampacked apartment.

For two days we cleaned out drawers, cabinets, and boxes. We marveled at the things she had insisted on bringing along even though she would never use them--mended sheets that were likely several decades old, stacks and stacks of old margarine containers that had been washed for use storing leftovers, herbs and spices in containers so old they were barely legible--she had saved as much as she possibly could have for the cross-country trip. (We even found a box of tampons, which was particularly strange since my grandmother had a hysterectomy in the 70's, well before this box of Tampax had ever been made. After trying to figure out why she had them and resisting the urge to chalk it up to the Alzheimer's, we ultimately decided she had bought them to have in the house for guests who might need one, and then could not bear to throw away a perfectly good full box...so she moved them with her to Florida.) She had dry goods and canned goods with the date written on the top in Sharpie so we could tell exactly when she had bought this 7 year old bag of flour, or that 6 year old jar of pickles. She had probably 50 bath towels in various stages of disintegration and dozens of hand towels, some of which were clearly old bath towels that had been cut up.

We laughed about the depression era ways of my grandparents, how they refused to throw anything away even though they surely must have recognized that they would never use that holey towel from 1965 or that bag of flour that was purchased in the 80's. Why did they hold on to such things when my parents bought them all new towels when they moved to Florida, or when a new bag of flour was only three dollars? The answer, now that I think about it, was simple: They never knew when they might need it. Once you have had to get by with nothing, you never take anything for granted.

Today I read this NY Times story in which people my grandparents' age talk about what they remember doing to get by during the Great Depression. I see so many of my grandparents' old quirky habits in these stories. My other grandmother, who is still alive, has refused to use her new clothes dryer in the house she just moved into. After a lifetime of hanging the clothes on the line, she just can't get used to any other way. She has instilled her hoarding nature into my mother, such that I remember growing up with a pantry full of empty jars and plastic margarine containers that my mother wouldn't throw away. She still doesn't--when she sent people home with leftovers from Thanksgiving last year, it was all packed into those same jars and containers. (I now have a lovely jelly jar that previously held leftover gravy.) My mother was taught to sew at a young age, and so instead of spending a hundred dollars apiece on my homecoming dresses in high school, she made all of them herself from patterns she let me select. When the bread gets moldy, my mother insists on cutting off that part but eating the rest, even if she has to make it into croutons or breadcrumbs to disguise it from me and my father (who are always quite repulsed.)

As much as I have made fun of my family for their spendthrift ways, as we face an economic crisis like we have never dealt with before in my lifetime I find these quirky behaviors seeming far more sane. At the start of the Depression, people probably thought it would be over before things got truly painful then, too. They figured they might have to use up their savings, they might need to sell the things they could part with like cars and jewelry. They figured maybe they would have to move to a cheaper house or a smaller apartment. They certainly never imagined that for years upon years there would be no work, no way to earn money for food. They did not fathom that they might have to feed the entire family for a week on what they would once have spent for one meal at a restaurant. They probably did not envision going for 6 or 7 years without buying a single thing that was not vitally essential to daily survival--no towels, sheets, clothes, shoes, books, lamps, or even a stove. If it broke, you found another way.

I'm hopeful we will never need to know that depth of sacrifice, resolve and ingenuity. I want to say that a month's worth of rising stock market prices and an injection of government spending are signs that the recovery has begun, however slowly. But I have renewed appreciation for the quirks of my family that once annoyed me, and what they arose out of. It is only after you have known that dark, deep level of fear, that endurance of a basic survival condition for so long that you never thought it would ever get better, that you would continue to reflexively hoard a twenty-five year old tin of cocoa because "you never know...one day you just might need it."