Yard Sales and Thrift Shopping

What makes a person hoard, or collect things?

Was it what triggered my mother's frequent visits to thrift shops and yard sales? She seemed to have a never ending compulsion to buy up trinkets, knick knacks, kitchen ware and clothing.

She had various collections over the years. I remember the rooster stage. The house was full of them. Then there was the "copper kitchen" phase. Her Hummel figurines and angels had their own shelves strategically placed throughout the house. Still, she culled and cleared once in a while. Her sense of being a dutiful housewife had not been overidden her desire to own things. Underneath it all, she was a clean freak.

If Mom had a penchant for signs of abundance, I'm sure it was due to the poverty of growing up in the post depression era. It was a time of little food, clothes made out of papa's worn shirts and going without shoes all summer to save the expense of buying new ones. She owned one doll in her whole childhood, and one little child size teapot she cherished until the day she died.

In order for me to come to the decision of becoming a minimalist, I am affording myself a look upon that which has brought me to this point as I tackle the not insurmountable task of divesting myself of "stuff". The last ten years, I have lived in one house, beginning with it empty, except for bare minimum of belongings. Now, I'm guessing, my belongings could accommodate the needs of several families.

I have diligently discarded margarine tubs, and not allowed myself to have sentimental attachment to Christmas cards and magazines. (Paper is my weakness.) I've regularly made a run through my house de-cluttering and discarded things a la Fly Lady. But, like my mother, I have a penchant for the delight of finding a treasure at a bargain price whether it be a teacup edged in gold or sturdy bedsheets.

About five years ago I gave up stopping at yard sales! It was sort of like severing my arm from my body, but I needed to lighten the burden of my "things". I wanted to let go and be free of excess. It's an addiction difficult to break.

At first it was extremely challenging to drive by without taking a wistful look. I learned to carry no cash. Who would take a check for even my most avid purchase? And it certainly helped having someone else do the driving, admonishing me, "Don't Look!"

Today, however, I stopped at the thrift shop on a whim. They take credit cards, you know. The store called out to me, I swear. "Stop! Don't pass me by!"

Or was that "buy"?

It's Mom's Birthday

Today is my mother's birthday. She would have been 89. She led a good life, a hard life. She had such a lovely name, Genevieve.

Her early memories were of living in the lumber camps, where Papa's work was still necessary, a blacksmith when it was a dying art. Her mother worked as cook and washerwoman for the lumber company. Their home, less a home than we can imagine, with a shed-porch where she and her brother slept and woke up to snow on the bed, because of the open slats holding up the roof.

She didn't think it was a hard life then. She just thought that was the way life was.

In a way, she worked for the lumber camp herself, setting the long tables with plates and eating utensils. Putting syrup, molasses, salt and home made jams in the center for the pancakes while her mother cooked up the big pans of bacon and eggs fried in their grease.

Once the lumbering dried out, no more trees to cut, you see. They went to live in the house of a relative who took them in. Papa tried to run his smithy there on that Crooked Creeak Road out "in the sticks", as she called it. Papa died when she was nine, at the beginning of the fall of the stock market and the Depression. It made no difference in their lives. They were already poor.

So she could find work as a housekeeper, mother sent her off to live with her older, married sister.

A year later she was brought home to live with Mother and her new Step-Dad.  Suddenly, the poverty was not so oppressive as her mother continued to work in a diner as a cook. Her pies the prize of the county.

Those are just some facts about my Mom's childhood, shared for no particular reason except today is my mother's birthday and these things have come to mind.

The first photo is my mother as an infant with her mother and aunt, and work horse.

Second photo was taken the year Papa died.

The third photo was taken when Genevieve was 14, when times were better.