I was thinking the other day about the Great Depression. This loomed large in my upbringing. My Dad was born two days before the Stock Market Crash in 1929, and my Mom was born in 1935.
Mom was always very concerned about waste and not making the most of what you had. The emblamatic story for her is that she used to yell at us if we ate an apple but left an unacceptable amount of white on the core. "Apples are twenty-five cents apiece!" It is a long time since apples have been that price, so that probably dates the story exactly during my difficult teenaged years in the late 1970's, when I thought this injunction was ridiculous, but I think it has been very, very rare in my life that I would start eating an apple that I didn't intend to finish as much as possible right down to the core.
Her mother, my Grandmother, was very thrifty and hung onto things just in case they might be useful later. She was a saver of string and rubber bands, she was a canner who put up food for the winter, she was a buyer of bargains at garage sales. The emblematic story about Grandma is that after she passed away, when my Mom and Dad and Mom's sisters were going through the house and getting things ready for an estate auction, they found several broken chairs in the garage, which hadn't even been in the house, they were broken chairs that Grandma had picked up at a different auction or yard sale, thinking they would be perfectly good once she fixed them (except she never fixed them, and the garage was chalk full of stuff like this).
I was thinking about the Great Depression mostly as a mirror of current economic worries, when more and more people are unemployed and underemployed, and having trouble making ends meet even with a 40 or 60 hour work week. The Great Depression, economically anyway, was an artifact created by unsustainable behavior by banks and the Stock Market. Terrible living conditions could arise again, from similar bad institutional actions. We might have to live through something terrible like that again, but we did get through it the first time. I'm not saying it was easy, and I'm sure there were many lives lost and destroyed and families ripped apart, but as a species, we did it, we got through it and improved lives again. So, I hope we don't have to go through another economic crisis of that severity, and I know there are some checks and balances to make sure that it doesn't happen again, but if we do, or even something not quite as severe, I have confidence that we will get through it again.
But having that picture in my mind, of Dust Bowl men and women in battered hats and dust-colored clothes, saving string, it set up a strange echo with the Decluttering theme that is all around me now (see previous post).
My turning point was one time when I was moving out of a house that had a leak in the back wall of the basement. It was built on a hill, and every time there was a strong rain, a gush of water would pour out of a crack between the bricks in that wall. Somehow, I had still been storing cardboard boxes in that basement, from when we had moved in. I had moving boxes, but I also had all the original cardboard boxes of things I had bought, including for a toaster that I didn't have any more because it had stopped working. I had the box from the new toaster as well.
All at once, I realized that I didn't need to save these boxes. Sure, cardboard might be useful one day for something, but also, there are boxes freely available in the world all the time, so if you need a box, there will be one there, or you could buy a box, we had enough money at that time to buy a box if we needed one, so there was no reason to keep them.
I got rid of all those boxes, and have bought new ones whenever I needed boxes thereafter, and have been released from the burden of having to house and care for and keep dry all that cardboard, that piles up in one's life.
In that once decision, I pivoted from the Depression Baby of my Mother and Grandmother, to a modern Declutterer, who values a clean, orderly house without too much stuff in it. Within one generation, these values have shifted entirely.
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