Waste Not, Want Not

Having grown up with a “depression era” Mom, we learned about recycling at a very early age. You didn’t throw anything away. We washed the bread sacks, and reused them, washed the aluminum foil and reused it, paper grocery sacks lined the trash can, and before it was all over, Mother was even using the empty plastic bag inside the cereal box to place between her meat patties, or pork chops or steaks to put in the freezer.“It doesn’t tear when it gets wet like wax paper does!”, she would say in response to my rolling my eyes at what seemed to be this extreme of “savings”.
Keeping butter containers, cottage cheese containers, any plastic container with a lid was a given, and when we moved Mother out of her house, we girls couldn’t help but laugh at the number of cottage cheese containers we found stacked up and ready for use in her cupboards. We teased Audrey at the time that we would keep all those as part of her dowry when she decided to marry.
Well, I am here to confess that the dowry is intact, and Mother would have burst with pride if she had been here to see what I discovered in my attic the other day. What I was doing in my attic is another story, but it led me to unearth a particular box, dusty, and dirty but closed tightly against the 16 years of accumulation of filth. As I pulled the box from beneath the others stacked upon it, I questioned myself about its contents. After all, I had been the one to fill it and seal it, and place it in the attic. What in the world could it be?
Imagine my relief, amazement, and sheer hysteria when I opened the box to discover several stacks of, you got it, plastic containers! Cottage cheese, ice cream, whipped topping, butter, you name it, and I’d saved it!
For one split second I seriously thought about resealing it, and placing it back in the attic for my children to some day run across and………..yea, you get it, and they would have too. However,upon closer inspection, the containers, after being exposed to extremes of the attic were stiff, and brittle, and not worth much, thus I pitched them. I couldn’t help but shake my head and laugh at the fact that for years that box of plastic containers had been in my attic paying homage to the fact that I DID recycle just like my mama had taught me. I was ready to deal with any surplus that came along. The reason they were in the attic, was because at the time of the move, I had enough recycled plastic containers in my kitchen cupboards that the multitude in the box were considered surplus!
I called my sister Anita to share with her that I had finally found the hidden family treasure of such great value; we both got a good laugh. But underneath, we also knew that the containers were just an outward sign of an inward lesson we had learned growing up with Mama: Don’t be wasteful!