Mom, the Great Depression, and the Trumpeter

A hopeful sign of spring

My spider plant got left out in the cold

but one brave shoot is poking its head up

Spring and good times are coming

Like many Americans, my reaction to the dramatic drop in the stock market ranged from disappointment (there’s that trip I wanted to take my daughter on and my friends who wanted to replace the windows in their house) to mild and brief panic. No, I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but my mom lived through it, and I have heard the stories. More directly, I saw the lifelong impact it had on her.

Born in 1900, Mom was in her thirties in the years of the Depression, a mother at thirty-two, a widow at thirty-four. The years of scraping by and making do showed in her housekeeping. She hated to throw out leftovers and would squirrel them away in small containers in the back of her fridge. In her later years, we would periodically clean out those containers and find many with mold growing. When I was a young wife and mother and would say of leftovers, “Just pitch it,” she mocked me and finally made me see the error of my ways. Her frugal habit is surely the origin of my soup of the week—I collect and freeze leftovers and put them all together when there’s enough to make a pot of soup with the addition of broth or canned tomatoes (this week it definitely tastes of lamb).

Mom re-used paper towels. She’d clean a spot on a counter or something and then stash the slightly-used paper towel in a special place she had for them. Spill on the floor? Out came one of those slightly used pieces of towel. She saved bits of string. And foil? The smallest pieces were saved and re-used. Of course, she washed out plastic bags when they became available. Socks beyond darning (who has a darning egg these days?) became dust rags, great for running your hands over stairs.

Mr. Trump would be in the cross-hairs of Mom’s ire for many reasons, among them the fact that he has not taken responsibility for this historic drop in the market the way he was quick to take credit for the meteoric rise in the Dow Jones. The rumor that he once said a president in office when the market dropped a thousand points in a day should be shot into the air from a cannon is that—a rumor, or as he likes to say, “fake news.” But he does consistently ignore that the rise in the market began well back in the Obama years—he probably dismisses the  calendar and history. I’m sure he’ll never mention any possible connection between his disastrous tax bill and the market fail.

I saw a cartoon on Facebook recently that should give us all pause. It showed a homeless person, asleep on a park bench, covered by newspapers for just a bit of warmth. The caption suggested that instead of measuring our economy by how well the wealthiest among us are doing, we should measure by how the poorest are doing—or not doing.

Food for thought.