Last week after making my boyfriend some chicken for dinner, I rinsed off and disposed of the styrofoam tray. This is a totally normal thing to do, but I was reminded of how my grandmother never threw out styrofoam meat trays. She saved and repurposed them.
When I was a kid, Grandma would make me lacing cards from styrofoam trays. I’m not sure if kids today even play with lacing cards, but they were pretty common back in my youth and were generally things you bought. They looked like this:
They were generally made of cardboard with colorful images printed on them with a series of connect-the-dots style holes. They came with a piece of yard with plastic tips at either end, like a shoelace, or if you were at Grandma’s house they were made out of an upcycled meat tray and a piece of yarn with Scotch tape at the ends.
Why buy something when you can make it yourself seemed to be Grandma’s motto when it came to toys. Back in the 1980s Grandma used to regularly receive a mail order catalog called Harriet Drake filled with strange gadgets and such that seemed especially designed to appeal to old ladies. The Memory game I played with as a kid was made out of images clipped from Harriet Drake catalogs and attached to this fancy cardstock which I think had been something my great aunt had taken home from her place of work. All I know is Grandma kept sheets and sheets of the stuff that had a shiny yellow back and a plain cardboard front beneath her bed and used it for EVERYTHING.
I know my family is not alone in this habit of turning trash into, if not treasures, exactly, then at least useful objects. My boyfriend was fairly old before he learned that guitar picks don’t actually look like this:
In his musical household, they had simply saved plastic bread ties to use as guitar picks because they work just as well as one of those store bought picks and come free with every loaf of bread. To this day he saves these bread ties in a little plastic container (it too came free with some purchased food years ago) in a drawer in the kitchen (this photo above is just a sample of the collection) because who (besides me) would dare throw out a perfectly good bread tie?
My grandparents all lived through the Great Depression and it shaped them in different ways My other grandmother was fond of stocking up on stuff. Their garage looked like a small grocery store. Long before I ever heard the term ‘Doomsday Prepper’ I had experience with the shelves and shelves of non-perishable food at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I wonder if the different shortages of various consumer products we all experienced in 2020 will have a lifelong impact on the behaviors of today’s young people as the Great Depression certainly shaped my grandmother’s shopping habits well into her senior years.
I know that I always feel a bit guilty when I finish a jar of pickles and I dump the perfectly good leftover pickle juice down the drain instead of saving it in the fridge as my thrifty upcycling Grandma did. She used to use it when making coleslaw. I don’t even like coleslaw, but I still feel bad about wasting leftover pickle juice.
I think we probably all have different learned habits about saving and reusing things that other might consider trash. I can still hear in my head the tune of a popular song my grandparents used to sing, “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” I never did save bubblegum on my bedpost, but I will say the bedpost on my childhood bed not to mention the mattress itself was used by my dad and his brothers when they were boys, and perhaps might have even been older than them. We may have thrown out bread clips in my family, but there were a LOT of things we saved and reused.
I struggle with the guilt of feeling wasteful when I get rid of something that could potentially some day maybe be used for something, and my desire to not have to deal with a lot of clutter. But I do feel that it’s fair to point out that I live in a house that has in its garage something that we refer to as “The Volkswagen of Boxes” which is quite literally a partially restored VW Bug that has no interior, engine or windows and instead is overflowing with empty cardboard boxes that might someday be exactly the right size for something we need to ship out.
— Alissa
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
What I’m Watching: Bupkis (the show by that title and not just my clever way of saying I’m not watching anything)
What I’m Listening to: “Hayloft I and II” by Mother Mother
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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
When I was a little girl, tea bags had strings with tags on them. My mother saved the strings and used them to darn my father's white work socks (he was a baker).
Thank you for this wonderful article--I enjoyed it so much.