Repairing, making do ... where has it gone?

It's raining out today, so I'm inside catching up on some of the house things ... laundry, folding clothes, packaging the frozen rabbit pieces ... things that have gotten side tracked in favor of getting the outside things done while the weather permits.

I found myself picking up a pair of socks, seeing a hole in the heel and rolling it up to be tossed in the garbage and wondering why we throw things away and buy replacements? That's not what I grew up with and I'm not sure when it happenet changed.

I remember evenings at the ranch house before my grandparents retired.

My grandfather often had a bridle or section of harness and his leather sewing kit, replacing a buckle, or rope, braiding in a new lead. He was the one that taught me how to braid with four strands or cord rather than the usual three.

I don't remember my grandmother ever sitting in her rocking chair without her hands being busy. Her sewing basket sat beside the chair, always with stockings waiting to be darned. Like many ranch women then, she always wore a dress and in the winter, especially, heavy brown cotton stockings were worn to keep legs warm. I remember the wooden egg she would slide into the toe or heel of the stocking and weave the thread expertly across the hole as she repaired it. When the darns were developing holes, they were discarded, but not into the garbage. The foot was cut off and the leg cut into strips, to be put in the rug rag bag, where they would eventually be hooked or braided into rugs for the side of the bed on cold winter mornings.

Clothing was patched and patched again, until the cloth at knees and elbows would no longer hold a patch. Then the garment was taken apart to become a shirt for me or quilt pieces for another winter quilt. Heavy wool clothing was especially valued for these everyday winter quilts, as heating was by coal stove, one in the kitchen and one in the living room, no extra heat in the bedrooms and not particularly effective insulation. During winter blizzards, I can remember brushing a fine sifting of snow off thenorth window sill in the bedroom, and being thankful of an extra wool patchwork quilt.

Almost everything I can remember my grandparents giving as gifts, other than books ... for me, usually, as I was a reader from a very young age ... was handmade. My grandfather made my "hope chest" ... something every girl was expected to have and in my case my name was on the front, carefully cut by hand from scrap plywood with a coping saw.

My grandmother often gave hand-embroidered pillowcases which she edged with crocheted lace as gifts. I remember her sorting through her box of transfers to find something "suitable" for a wedding or a birthday and deciding on the color scheme. She taught me to embroider, starting with a simple kitten design on kitchen towels, although I found the crocheting much more difficult and was never good at that until I started working with yarn, years later.

My grandfather had one set of "town clothes", wool dress pants, a tan western shirt and a tweed wool jacket with leather trim. I remember photos of him in those clothes when I was still in grade school and he was buried in that same set of clothes nearly 20 years later.

I don't remember my grandmother every having a "store bought" dress until after they were retired and living in town and my mother took her to a store and insisted she buy a dress and a sweater before they drove out to visit her older brother on the coast. She had favorite patterns that she made her dresses from and a whole package of apron patterns as well.

This is typical of how I remember her, in a picture taken when she was in her early 70s, after my grandfather's death, when she was spending summers at the ranch with my parents. Dressed in a cotton print "house dress" with a flour sack apron over it, her hair neatly rolled and sitting in front of a bank of lilacs near the cellar.
I'm not sure when it started being easier to replace rather than repair, although it seems things now are often made to be quickly obsolete. Sales people and advertising emphasizes the need for you to wear the current style to be seen as "successful" and there's always a new "gadget" that makes things easier and quicker and someone to convince you that you really can't do without it.

But for me, one of the most cherished keepsakes I have is a kitchen towel I embroidered to give as a gift to my grandmother when I was not yet a teenager. She kept it in her "special drawer" until her death, then it went to my mother's hope chest. After my mother's death, it came back to me, one of the few tangible memories of when you "made do" ... and gifts were something that you invested time and thought into rather than a quick trip to the store with a credit card.