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Recycling

         We all know to recycle plastic, glass, newspaper/magazines and aluminum. But there's another kind of recycling that came up before the "green" movement.

         My mother was born at the end of the great depression. So I guess these habits I have come from my grandmother. Nothing was wasted. If a garment was stained or torn, before you threw it out, you removed the zippers and all the buttons. You would reuse them someday. I still want to do that, but zippers don't have the same enduring quality any more, so I skip those. I won't let myself do it any more, but you use to save the fabric if you could for doll clothes or patches or quilts. In the sixties and seventies, you cut up old jeans to make rag rugs or piece together in art projects or even make purses.

         Jars get washed and used for storage. My dad still keeps peanut butter jars in the garage for screws and nails and whatever. He always seems to need one more. When my youngest brother was a baby, Dad took the empty baby food jars and nailed the lids to a board. He hung the board in the ceiling of his workshop, and used the jars to hold miscellaneous items like picture hooks or fishing wire and just screwed them into the board when he was done. It was a low ceiling, and he was six feet tall. It was too high for us kids to raid his supplies without a ladder.

         When I go to senior homes for visits, their kitchens look like my parents'. The cupboards are full of recycled cottage cheese cups and butter cups. I throw some away when Dad's not looking. More will appear later on. They've been "green" since they were babies, because they had to be. Now we're so wasteful. And we've accumulated too much.

         It's been a big deal to me to throw papers away at work. They accumulate quickly. But at least we have a recycling box, so I can throw them out without trashing or wasting paper. Some things just have to be on paper and not a computer screen.

         Meanwhile, I hate to throw away dish cloths even when they're tattered, or bath towels. Shoes are the easiest to throw out, because once they're worn, you can't use them. TV's and things like that are much harder to throw out. But it does seem we've gone from one extreme to the other.