Grandmothers’ recycling ghosts

Grandparents’ Day?

I wouldn’t have thought of it had not the ladies at Curves invited all the grandmas in the place to bring pictures of their grandchildren.

Now getting grandmothers to show off their grandbabies takes no special finesse. Even I remembered to bring a picture of mine, and caught myself gravitating in mid-workout toward the display on the bulletin board.

I got right nostalgic when one of the grandmothers in the group talked about making her granddaughter a new dress for the first day of school. She had just placed the last hemstitch when the little girl asked her to use the scraps to make her doll a dress to match.

She did, of course, and before she could catch her breath, the child’s younger sister was putting her order in. Grandmotherhood can be demanding at times.

I started remembering first days of school when our girls were young. I dearly loved to sew for them – and their dolls – but my sense of time was as bad then as it is now. More than once on the night before that all-important first day of the school year I was up late finishing the last details of the new dress.

I don’t sew much now. Clothes are relatively inexpensive and I tend to keep what I have for a long, long time, so I don’t even sew for myself. And the grandbabies are boys.

For some reason, while reveling in nostalgia, I got to thinking about a long-ago windfall that really helped with the details, especially of doll clothes. I bought a spool of thread that must have been damaged in some way because it broke after every few inches of passing through the sewing machine’s needle.

We couldn’t afford to throw out a whole spool of thread – it must have cost all of 29 cents – so I wrote to Coat & Clark and complained. I didn’t even send it back; that would have cost almost as much as the spool cost in the first place, and I had no guarantee they’d replace it.

Less than two weeks later, I received several new rolls of thread from Coat & Clark, plus a packet of trim, lace, ruffles, zigzag, bias tape, elastic – none more than 18-24 inches long, perfect to edge a doll’s sleeves or to use on people’s clothes where a perfect match is not needed.

I wrote and thanked them, of course, and that was but the first of several such packages. I don’t believe I ever bought trim again. I’ve certainly never bought another brand of thread, right up to the present.

I also purchased a couple of jars of buttons in a permanent flea market not long after we started our family. One jar had mixed shapes and colors, the other white, and both were guaranteed to have at least six of the same button. I transferred them into candy boxes to make them easier to search through. Over the years, if a garment was truly worn out, I snipped off the buttons and added them to a candy box before sending it to Dave’s workshop.

Voila, a bottomless pit of buttons to this day, a few of which actually match.

Fifty years ago Dave’s mother, who had an eye for the unusual, bought and gave him a bag of slightly miscut wooden parts. He still reaches into it when he needs a knob or a dowel, a pan or stamp handle, or perhaps a yo (that’s half a yo-yo).

My mother instilled thrift in me. She was in her early 30s when the Great Depression made thrift a way of life, but Mom was a pinchpenny regardless of the national economy. It’s just how she was.

She kept an old pillowcase on a hook in the basement stairway and into it went every garment, towel, sheet, whatever simply could not give another day of use. Any time I needed a piece of cloth for anything, the answer was always, “Look in the rag bag.” Homemade Halloween costumes, a new dust cloth, strips to tie up tomato plants, pieces sturdy enough for a patchwork quilt – they all came from the rag bag.

I’m grateful that in our day we can find a second home for clothes we’re merely tired of by giving them to the Kidney Fund or Good Will. My mother’s ghost will not permit me to throw away anything with wear left in it.

Mom never threw out leftover food either. I was reminded of that the other day when I cleaned out the fridge and made mixed vegetables from what I found in there. Yellow squash, onions, snow peas, carrots – they made a lovely dish.

Wait, I’m not done. Some was left over, so I threw in some fresh mushrooms, drained chopped tomatoes and a handful of cooked tortellini and made a frittata of it. You know, three or four eggs beaten frothy with a tiny bit of milk, plus salt and pepper and a handful of shredded cheese and crumbled feta, poured over the veggies in the sauté pan, and cooked gently until firm.

Yum. Much better than on day 1, and perfect recycling.

How did we get from grandmotherhood to recycling?

Maybe I’m hearing a teenage boy speaking from the future – “My grandmother never threw away anything” – with just a hint of pride in his voice.