Monday's Musings

Good Monday evening. Had a busy day so I am just getting around to commenting on a situation as I see it. I have read several articles lately in magazines and newspapers on how to live frugally. It seems that these hard times are forcing people to think about how they are spending their money. Now needless to say, if you had been raised by mama and daddy you already know how to think about spending your money for they would think and think and think and often say, "No." This was in response to a perfectly logical request we would think but somehow they wouldn't see it as a necessity.

We also used everything until it wore out. When you outgrew your blue jeans they became blue jean shorts. When your long sleeves became too short they became short sleeves. When dresses became too short, the hem that had been put in extra wide was let out and a piece of rick rack was put on to cover up the faded line from the old hem. You could also put on a piece of lace or a tuck, but you wore it out. Old towels became wash cloths or dish towels. Old washcloths became dust cloths along with worn out undershirts. You just didn't throw it away until there wasn't anything left.

Mama used to joke about my panties. She would accuse me of wearing them until there was nothing left but the elastic around the waist but who taught me to wear them out. Of course, when we left the house we tried to always have on clean and no holes underwear for we might be in a wreck and have to go to the hospital. What emergency room examines underwear I don't know, but we were always careful to have on clean decent underwear just in case.

Now if your jeans wore out in the knees but were still long enough that was a simple iron on patching job and if just a rip, mama could mend it as good as new. Thank goodness she stopped short of patching the heels of socks. We were allowed to throw those away when they became "holey." That would have been a tad uncomfortable.

We also had everyday clothes, school clothes and church clothes and they never mixed with each other. That was forbidden! There was a ranking of clothes and you could go down in rank, but not up and no mixing. Your Sunday clothes could become school clothes if not too fancy and your school clothes would become every day, but don't mix the 2 and mostly the Sunday clothes got handed down to someone who needed them worse than we did. You pulled your Sunday clothes off the minute you got home from church and put them on hangers and hung them in the closet, unless you were my brothers. Arvin and Sam would begin shucking shoes and clothes the minute they got in the car at church and by the time we drove the 5 miles home they would be down to decent and that's all. Shoes always came off first. Also, when you got home from school you changed into play clothes before going out to play for all 3 of us were dirt magnets and we seemed to find a way to tear or rip clothes.

It was a good thing our mama could sew our clothes for we could destroy them. She made most everything except the jeans, knit shirts and underwear. We were some of the best dressed kids in town or the country cause our mama was gooood. If I found a picture of a dress I wanted, she could make it. That is until I became a seamstress and then she kinda let me have it. That was OK for she was a good teacher.

Now back to living frugally. It's not painful, it doesn't hurt and you get used to it and your children stop calling you frugal or you are like your Scottish ancestors, they just call you stingy.
Maybe so, but I'm probably not going to change so just get over it.

Nuff said

The (frugal) Georgia Peach

1 comment:

Sam said...

My kids have always heard me quote that old Rolling Stone's song, "You can't always get what you want". The say they're going to put that on my tombstone.

"But just sometimes you get what you need."

Sam