I haven’t had the energy to write blog posts lately because I am writing a novel, so I was very happy when my sister sent me a piece she wrote this week, inspired by reading Elizabeth Hay’s wonderful memoir, All Things Consoled: A Daughter’s Memoir. The thrifty mother in that book made Jude think of our Mom, so she wrote this story called, simply, “Thrifty.” Thank you Jude, for being the guest blogger today and for memories of our mother.
by Judith Walker
My fridge is in a sad state. My previous fridge was original to the over twenty year old mobile home I live in. It tucked in nicely between the dishwasher, the overhead cabinets, and a wall. Replacing it was not easy. Fridges these days are huge, shiny double doored affairs, enough space to store food for a village. I do not want or need one of these, and I do not have the space. I was happy to finally find a fit, but my joy did not last long. Almost immediately the door shelf broke and had to be fixed with packing tape. Next, the precariously balanced glass shelves gave away. So now I have a cold cavern with one shelf and a couple of bins in my attempt to keep it organized. It is noisy and annoying but it does its job of keeping food at a safe temperature, so I will keep it until it dies. I dread that day. Things are piled high in there, multiple recycled containers with this and that, bags of cheese, squashed plates of leftovers, at least the veggie drawers are still intact. I have had a tiny dish of cranberry sauce buried in the pile since Thanksgiving dinner over a month ago. I refuse to get rid of it. I have some local turkey cutlets in the freezer that I will cook eventually, so I may use it…why buy a whole can for that? And as far as I’m concerned turkey needs cranberries.
I hate waste, the older I get the more I grieve our planet that is drowning in garbage. I am disgusted by our consumer culture, the cheap throwaway products, the over packaging, the careless greed. I am thrifty, but not obsessive (yet). I am my mother’s daughter.
Mom was born in 1929, the eve of the depression. She grew up in hand-me-downs and shoes that didn’t fit. Her parents were immigrant farmers, there was always enough food but it was a hardscrabble life and being the sixth of seven children and a girl she was made to feel a burden and not an asset. She was picking grapes on the farm by age seven and her dad taught her to drive when she was twelve so she could “take Mama to town.” The only book in their house was the Bible, something she loved to tell us while reclining amongst her overstuffed bookcases. Some of her few joys as a child were once- weekly piano lessons and a pony she shared with her much favoured older sister. She did not attend school till grade five, I’m not sure why, I think her parents did not let her go to school barefoot and needed her on the farm. Against all odds she became a respected professional in the academic world. Her thirst for knowledge and a chance meeting with a woman who would become her mentor and best friend propelled her towards a path of self-respect and achievement.
When Mom became a wife and young mother times were hard. Dad worked at menial jobs while pursuing a degree. Mom was at home raising her girls and trying to make ends meet. One of her oft told stories was when she shared her accomplishment with a friend after making a stew from a lamb neck. Her friend replied, “Virginia, you are making a virtue of a necessity.” Later in life she told that with pride.
In those early years Mom revelled in her maternal role. She made us dolls, doll clothes, tiny furniture from popsicle sticks, perfect for our cardboard box tiny houses. She set up an easel in our back yard and we had unending recycled paper from old bill boards. She baked bread and let us help turn the leftover dough into cinnamon buns. Mom let us express our wild side. She encouraged curiosity and exposed us to as much art, music and books as she could. She also cut our hair and sewed our clothes. Mom was not a lover a fashion at this point in her life, clothes were utilitarian and needed to be functional, and cheap. She took apart her old dresses and somehow made them into shifts for us, to be worn over a turtle neck and tights and passed down the from sister to sister. I don’t remember ever feeling deprived. When we moved from funky California to an upper middle class neighbourhood in white Toronto my friends and peers were kids of doctors and lawyers. They had school clothes and “party clothes,” dresses in pastels with poofy arms and white shoes. My best clothes were a kilt, a turtle neck, knee socks. And my little cowgirl boots. That is what I wore to parties with my rich friends. I remember being gently mocked, I didn’t really care. I knew and they knew that I was a cool kid.
As my mother’s career advanced so did her income. She bought a shitty house in a great neighbourhood and made it into a beautiful home. I remember her, in her fifties, in a bikini on a hot summer day pulling up tiles in the back. She loved that house, that home. She lived there for over forty years. Almost half of her life. She never stopped her thrifty ways. She bought the best, but always on sale, she never paid full price. She was an ardent recycler until her last years when she told me “I just don’t give a shit any more.” Can’t blame her.
When I visited her a few months before she died we talked about what would happen to her things when she died. At one point she opened a drawer in her kitchen, the junk drawer. There was a nest of hundreds of elastic bands in the corner. She looked at it and looked at me, and in a plaintive voice she said “I just wish I could find somebody to give these to!”
Oh mom. I told her nobody wants your old rubber bands. Look mom, they have lost all of their elastic! How long have been there? Decades? Oh mom. Poverty mentality.
I am sorry I was so dismissive. I honour my mother in many ways. I will never stop missing her voice. I have a beautiful sock doll she made for me. And some of the tiny furniture. And a drawer filled with twist ties, well used baggies, and rubber bands.
A few weeks ago, I picked up Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower from the cute little library on the front yard of a house around the corner. “Take a Book, Leave a Book” was painted in curlicued white letters across the blue cupboard doors. When I was a teenager, I decided I wasn’t interested in science fiction. Somehow, I only wanted to read things that were “real.” So I turned to 19th century British novels and early-mid 20th century American writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Of course I have cast my reading net much wider since then, but I still don’t tend to be drawn to science fiction or its sister genres, fantasy and horror. Yet, as I dug into Butler’s novel, I became engrossed by the young female narrator/ protagonist Lauren who is bent on survival in a dystopian America of the future. Her warrior spirit drives her to escape from the murder of her family and razing of her home in a gated community in Southern California and form a motley tribe of people all searching for safety. Due to her mother’s drug abuse, Lauren was born with hyperempathy, a disability that has her feeling other people’s pain to a debilitating degree. She develops a religion called Earthseed, whose God is Change because the only thing we can be certain of is that everything changes. What felt eerie about this novel, written in 1993, was that Butler’s portrayal of a dystopian nation read as strongly resembling Trump’s America.
I always prefer books as objects over digitized texts. I love the feel and look of books. I love to explore marginalia and marks, run my hands over bindings, examine tatters and pages folded over, text that has been underlined. The other day I picked up a well worn novel (The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli) from a free library that had written in the inside cover in elegant cursive, “Property of” followed by a rectangular stamp: The Cavern Hotel and Café, El Nido, Palawan. I Googled this mysterious place and discovered it is a hotel offering pod accommodations in the Philippines. So interesting. (The next day, Trip Advisor wondered if I would like to see the current rates for staying the Cavern.)
the dark, I enter into the world of Butler’s novel, where kindness is the last good thing, where people band together in tribes because love and human relationships are all that we have, and where impermanence is the only truth. Wait a minute, all of that is sounding familiar. Is it really the future, or is it now?
At the time, I thought the big change the Tower signified was the crumbling of ego. I was being called to surrender to the slow incremental losses of old age. But the Tower signifies sudden change, and today I believe it foretold the capital c Change the pandemic has brought: change that shakes the very foundations of our lives, change that brings our beliefs and systems under scrutiny and asks us what is most important in life.
Madeline Ruth Walker 