Frugality, Part 2

 To Jon's post on frugality, Sue adds this: The photo is a darning egg, to slip in your sock when you mend the hole in it; deco buckles, and bone underwear buttons.

     No doubt Johnnie was frugal; so was Vake’s household. Milly and Vake always had a “Victory Garden,” and canned or froze their own vegetables. They bought gunny sacks full of green beans to snip, de-string and can, and bought 23# boxes of apples for making and canning apple sauce.  When there wasn’t venison in the freezer, they bought locker beef. (Being an Ungrateful Little Wretch, I complained over one side of beef that was probably just young, and seemed too much like veal; and Vake complained that another tasted like it had been eating thimbleberry brush.) Once they bought 50 tough old stewing hens that had to be drawn, plucked, pinfeathers singed with a torch, and wrapped for freezing. They collected the unlaid eggs from inside the chickens, saving them in a jar in the refrigerator, to use. (Ungrateful Little Wretch refused to touch those, too.)  

     When clothing got too old to be used, Milly stripped it of buttons and zippers to use again, then put the cloth in the “rag bag” to serve as cleaning cloths. Eventually she had collected about a gallon of buttons that she saved in a wooden bucket, and they became entertainment for kids on a rainy day, to paw through and count. Some coat buttons bore art deco designs, and some were underwear buttons, round, smaller than a dime,  and cut from bone with two extra large holes cut in them. They would probably be collectors’ items today.

     Vake saved metal scraps left over from his plumbing work, and resold it to the metal junk dealer. He saved every little dab of paint left in a can because it might come in handy some day. He lined one of his tool benches with small electric motors left over from appliances that had failed . He saved a bag of glass wool salvaged from a water heater, but a neighbor’s cat found it, and used to drop her kittens. Vake could get carried away.  Once, long after he retired, he found a pallet on the beach that had been assembled with wood screws made of brass.  He came back with a screw driver and hammer and began salvaging the screws, which was a little embarrassing, because there was a young couple sitting on the edge of the pallet trying to watch the sun go down.