“You
were spoiled,” a friend at church kindly chided me after reading last week’s
column. I was raised with running water
and indoor plumbing; neither he nor his wife was. I loved hearing their stories of different
times and places. I kindly did not ask
if they would go back to living that way.
But their generation’s lifeways are
not the only ones being left behind in the sweep of industrial history. Mine are, too, something I discovered in a
long, luxurious evening phone call with a friend (which itself was impossible
when my mother was raising her family.)
We were talking about reducing the
clutter in our lives. She had spent
Sunday going through her collection of magazines. They had been sitting behind her couch in
boxes and bags since she moved seven years ago.
Recently retired, she found herself with a new job: what to do with her archive of New Yorkers
and college alumni magazines? I loved
hearing the gentleness she applied to both her magazines and herself. There was no condemnation for having kept
these things, which I hear from so many of my other friends at this stage in
our lives.
But then she surprised me. We moved on to her collection of empty jars,
which I also have in abundance. “You
know, some of them are canning jars, which are good forever. But there’s also the perfectly good jars from
pickles and things, which I save. I
finally put them into the dishwasher for one last time, each one with its
lid. Then I bagged them up and took them
down to Goodwill.” My heart took a lurch
for her gentle soul, knowing what was coming.
“I handed this man my bags, and he
said ‘What’s this?’ ‘Clean jars with
lids,’ I told him. He just looked at me
weird, then said ‘Recycle them.’” We let
the silence between us speak for itself a moment.
Clean jars with lids. I know that phrase from my childhood. We save them to hold collections of screws
and nails (short, medium, long;) thumbtacks, hooks and eyes, still-good zippers
ripped out of old dresses or the last half of the batch of tartar sauce we made
but didn’t eat. We save them because
they’re still good for a lot of things, and because it took energy to
manufacture them that will be wasted if they get smashed up in the recycling
process. We save them to hold small
batches of jam we might make this summer or olives we might cure this
fall. We save them because they still
have value, even if no one would buy them, not even at a thrift store.
My sewing machine jammed when I
tried to fix a dog collar last week. One
look at the yellow pages told me sewing machine repairmen are almost
extinct. When I asked the women at
church if they knew of a good one, they said “Who sews?” I thought of my shelves of fabric, the boxes
of patterns and notions I have saved, and realized I have neglected some of the
most basic living skills I learned to survive.
I think I’ll call my friend and tell
her what our golden years are for:
reviving those survival skills, not casting them off for greater
dependence on what the corporations want to provide. As a society, we might need those skills
someday.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a crocheter who writes.
You can send her your list of almost dead survival skills c/o P.O. Box
1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave
a comment below.
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