Lessons in “saving” from Grandma

There was an article on the internet news about saving money that I read with amusement yesterday. They were suggesting, among other things, that you use only a pea-size dollop of toothpaste when you brush your teeth. With the cost of toothpaste – and anything else these days – that is probably a big money saver right there!

Anyway, it got me thinking fond thoughts again about Grandma.

She once left a chicken leg ‘leftover’ in a motel bathroom window, between the screen and the glass (keeping it ‘refrigerated’ so she could take it along the next day for lunch) while traveling with my folks. They’d eaten in a restaurant that night and she hadn’t been able to eat all that they served. Not wanting to waste it, she put the chicken in the little plastic baggie that she always kept in her purse for just such a purpose. That she actually forgot to retrieve it in the morning pained her greatly, but we always thought it must have pained the motel owners even more till they actually found it themselves.

One year she was staying with my parents in Arizona around the holidays. I went to visit and noticed right away that there were orange peels hanging from the trees around the front of the house. Knowing that my mother was never in the habit of flinging garbage out the kitchen window and finding no other logical explanation, I just had to ask. Grandma was drying them so she could throw them in the fireplace as an air freshener.

That same visit found her sitting at the dining room table with a big bunch of pecans in front of her that she was shelling into 3 different piles: the nuts that came out whole went into one pile for putting on top of cookies; the ones that were broken were collected in another pile for cranberry relish; the crumbs were going to go out for the birds. Now that I think about it, she must have had a use for the shells too, though I don’t know now what it was.

Maybe someone else in the family can add to this story?