Waste Not

I was putting away the laundry the other day and noticed that several of my socks had developed small holes. These are not fancy socks. They are plain white cotton ones with an elasticized middle, which I like because they don't slide around inside my boots. Nor are they expensive, though I must admit I have no idea how much a pair of plain white socks might cost. Two dollars? Three?

My question is, should I darn these socks? I have needles; I have thread; I have a darning egg that I bought in a fit of domestic optimism in the 1970s and never used. I even have that scarcest of all commodities: time. What I don't have is the inclination.

I would rather write than mend socks. I would rather draw. I would even rather cook. And I would much rather read a book. But when I hear about how we Americans are going to have to make big changes in the way we live, I think it may mean that we should start mending our socks.

I grew up with mended socks. Mending stuff, in the Spain of the 1950s, was just another routine household activity, like dusting or ironing. If your family was particularly hard on clothes, you could hire a woman to come one afternoon a week to help with the mending. Otherwise it was up to the lady of the house and her maid to keep things in shape (not many people in the middle class had cars, but everyone had a live-in maid).

Besides socks, my mother and the maid mended bottom sheets –the flat, not the fitted kind. When they got worn in the center, they split them down the middle and then sewed the outside edges together. They turned shirt collars so the worn part was underneath. They mended my school uniforms. They even mended kitchen towels.

There was an art to mending. You picked the right color thread and then wove the edges of the rip together so that you ended with a smooth, flat surface. The edges of the mended patch were supposed to be straight and even, the stitches tiny, the result nearly invisible.

There was one thing my mother didn't mend: her stockings. When she got a run she took them around the corner to the lady who specialized in mending stockings. My mother and my aunts were forever running to the stocking mending lady.

I've been throwing away socks with holes during my entire adult life. And I have thrown away an entire rubber plantation's worth of pantyhose. Pantyhose make great ties for tomato plants, but I would have had to cover the entire east coast with tomatoes to use up all my torn pantyhose. I read somewhere that you could make a warm, attractive quilt by sewing lots of little square bags out of leftover fabric, stuffing them with old pantyhose and sewing the squares together, but I never got around to doing that.

I realize that the stories about my mother's mending sound like the ones told by Americans who lived through the Great Depression. But my mother and the European women of her generation who devoted themselves to mending were hardly on the brink of financial disaster. They were simply doing what their mothers and grandmothers had always done: squeezing the last bit of usefulness out of material things.

I have pleasant memories of those sock-mending times (of course I wasn't doing any mending): women sitting by a window, surrounded by clean-smelling laundry, talking, giving a satisfied sigh and folding each piece away as it was finished.

Maybe I could get a sock-mending group together....

December, 2008 "On Gloom"

The word “gloom” is onomatopoeic, like “crash” or “bump.” Just listen to that nauseous initial “gl,” followed by the prolonged mournful “oo.” And no sooner are you over that than “m” closes down like a trap, sealing you in a dingy space from which there is no escape.

Gloom lacks the nobility of sorrow, the romanticism of melancholy. It is often paired with “doom,” to reinforce the essence of all bad moods, which is to seem inescapable and eternal.

Gloom is the predominant color of this season, even in places where the sun shines year-round, like Florida and California. The entire planet is swimming in a soup of gloom. I would not be surprised if astronauts looking earthward saw, instead of that bright blue marble, a lump the color of dirty snow.

Gloom in the news, gloom in our hearts. I don't remember a period of such pervasive, national gloom. I missed the Great Depression and WWII, but I was fully present during the assassinations of the 60s. There was sorrow then, lots of it, and fear. And during the Vietnam war there was anger, succeeded by the disgust of the Watergate years. And then there were the enormous sorrow and fear caused by 9/11, not to mention the outrage felt by many towards the political scene. But it was different from the gloom of now, the gloom of all.

Perhaps it's because few things touch us as intimately, as directly as money--that's a gloomy thought right there. If there is someone who hasn't been affected by the state of the economy, I don't know who it is.

But I have cheerful news: it could be worse. We could be in a civil war!

I know because my parents—my mother was in her teens, my father in his early 20s-- lived through the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). My father lived with his family in Barcelona, my mother with hers in the country (they didn't meet until years after the end of the war). When the war began they were plunged into instant poverty, cold, hunger (though my mother escaped the hunger part--she lived on a farm), and terror. My father drank quarts of water before going to bed, to assuage hunger pangs. My mother remembers rushing out in the middle of the night to hide in a nearby creek to escape bombing raids. She and her siblings wore a small stick on a string around their necks to put between their teeth when the bombs fell, to keep their teeth from shattering. My father did not go outside his parents' apartment for three years, to avoid execution for having belonged to a Catholic youth group.

With the end of the war came the end of the terror, but the lack of food, electricity and infrastructure went on for years. Yet in the midst of that grey, gloomy time, my parents found each other, fell in love, got married, and produced me. They were poor, but so was everybody, and in comparison with the time of bombs and midnight executions, life was good.

In comparison with my parents' war years, my present life is idyllic. Things will have to get immeasurably worse before they can begin to match what they endured. In the end, economic woes can always be remedied by human kindness--you give your neighbor an egg and tomorrow she gives you a ride. But when human bonds dissolve, as they do in civil war, then it truly is hell on earth.

So when the days of gloom are upon us, I put my hopes on kindness and fellow-feeling, and trust that as long that holds, we can deal with whatever comes.

November 23, 2008 "Five Pumpkins"

This fall, one of the strategies I invented against the economic crisis was to scavenge pumpkins. The week after Halloween, people were as glad to get rid of them as my chickens were to eat them. Last week, however, when everything froze up, I noticed that it was taking the chickens a lot longer to eat their pumpkin. It must have hurt their beaks to bang them over and over into that block of orange ice.

Still, when a friend offered her leftover pumpkins, I could not turn them down. They were beautiful pumpkins, bright orange, and not a mark on them. And they were frozen solid. Driving home, I considered the situation. If I put the frozen pumpkins in the chicken house, the hens wouldn't touch them. Then a thaw would come, the pumpkins would get squishy, and the chickens might eat one or two before everything froze again, or the pumpkins rotted. A shameful waste of pumpkins, either way.

I took the five pumpkins in the house and put them on the kitchen counter to defrost overnight. What would I find in the morning? Would the pumpkins deliquesce like Dali watches? Would they explode and spatter everything with juice and seeds?

Next morning the pumpkins still sat, orange and intact, on my blue counter. They were not rotten or moldy or icky in anyway--just a bit soft. No way was I going to throw them on the compost. They were food, filled with vitamins and calories, and somebody—the chickens or the dogs—would benefit from them. But I would have to cook them.

I took a deep breath, sharpened my Chinese chopper, and set my big stock pot on the stove. I chopped the five pumpkins--saving the seeds for the chickens--and steamed them (this took a long time). When they were done, I cooled them and strained them and stuffed them into sixteen quart-sized jars, which I wedged into our overflowing freezer. Then I scrubbed the stock pot in the sink and wiped my brow.

There, I said, that's done! Waste not, want not. That will show AIG and those other malefactors....

But wait. Waste not? How many hours had I spent trying not to waste the five pumpkins? How much of my unique spirit and creative energy had gone into those sixteen jars? “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Shakespeare wrote. He was talking about lust. I am talking about pumpkins. Still, if we're talking economics here, the expense of spirit has definitely got to be accounted for.