It was recently when I was with my family at the beach staying in a condo when I began to notice the strange frustration with throwing things away. We had planned our meals to avoid blowing a lot of extra cash on mediocre dishes that were overpriced. But the problem arose at the end of each evening what to do with the banana peels, the apple peels, the left-over taco meat and taco shells.
Not only did if feel like we were throwing away money, we were creating quite a gross garbage can. Until this I had not stopped to realize how much we recycle on our three-acre postage stamp. And like my mother and grandmother living out in the country it just lends to not being wasteful. On our tiny farm the taco shells would be crushed and given to the chickens. The left-over lettuce the rabbits. The taco meat mixed in with dog food for Scrappy. The paper and cardboard containers would go in the burn pile and the peels in the compost pile for the garden.
Is this extra work? Until I stopped to think about it perhaps, but it has become such a way of life that I didn't even notice it until I began to flinch tossing it all away. Crawfish shells go into the lake for the turtles. Watermelon rinds go over the fence for the deep wood's critters. Everything short of cans and plastic never sees our garbage can, and yet our cans remain full by the end of each week.
I used to pick on my grandmother who I thought was ridiculous about making old things new to be reused. I remember clearly my mother spray painting my shoes for the winter to last longer if my foot had not grown. And her taking up hand-me-downs from neighbors to fit me. My grandmother would take all the little scraps of soap and wet them mashing them together to form one new bar.
My grandmother was a product of the depression and when we would ask her about this she would shrug her shoulders and explain that they never really went without. There was always good food on the table and fresh water from the well. Of course, I guess that also meant shucked corn cobs for the outhouse and slop for the pigs.
There are some components to growing up in the rural south that don't seem strange at all. Bartering garden vegetables and passing along the children's hand-me-down clothes are not a sign of poverty but great riches to be shared. And now the new craze of thrifting has been added to that list. That's right. Those new thrifters who are jumping on the latest fad of making old things new.
Well, let me speak for all southerners raised out in the country over the past several decades. We were thrifting when thrifting was not cool. We were composting when it meant making good sense out of things that still had a use. Let the city folks join in the fun and when the fad wears off the country critters will live to tell the tale of how there has never been nor ever will be a depression in the country. That is if you can stomach an occasional rabbit stew and squirrel dumpling.
