Now I understand why my father was so thrifty

For example, my father turned off the lights in the rooms that people had just left. Sometimes we left to go inside, but each time I was at home, I crossed the small corridor from where I was at each end of the house to click on the switch. Did you like a dark house?

With the lights out, the green end of the house was as sad as a real forest of Hansel and Gretel. My mother would come back from where she had been to turn on the switches.

My father also saved things. He wore the same plaid flannel shirts year after year, on top of each other, even indoors. In the basement store, when I was invited, he took long, thick, twisted nails that had been torn from planks with the end of the hammer claw, and crushed them with the big end, then they straightened out like new.

Store rusty nails in small glass jars

He saved the rusty nails, which had taken on a delicate copper color that I liked. Each size comes in its own unrivaled glass jar: screws, screw eyelets, all iron nails: tenpenny, nails, roofing nails, fine white nails and even some padding nails with truncated handles hidden by caps gold and curved.

But the frugal habit that my mother laughed at most was that my father would take the little pieces of soap and mash them together to make a jagged cupcake or a crushed oiled muffin.

He did not explain why he was doing these things. He explained nothing except, rarely, American politics. He was a silent man.

Maybe at that time my mother crushed it. But she was a good mother to me, and you don’t judge your parents when you’re still so young that it’s hard to tell them apart. Later, when I got married, they came to visit me to tell me that they were now a happy couple. My mother, so to speak, apologized. He said cheerfully, because everything was in the past: “I didn’t let him be the captain of his own ship.” They had a good year before she got sick with ALS.

The stories I told about my father

When I was an adult, I told my friends these funny childhood stories about my strange father: smoothing the bent nails, turning off the lights and keeping the tips of soap. People recognized that he had done these things to save money.

In the middle class, where my husband and I had slowly moved to a fairly safe place, saving money had started to seem strange. It was “cheap,” as my mobile mom put it, even before the postwar boom really started to lift our boat.

The goal of my generation, as our economic progress progressed, was to spend on visible objects, showing taste and means.

Also read: How to enjoy a frugal retirement

But over time, I realized that by telling the stories, they had lost the tinge of being funny weaknesses. They started to get closer to being economy. Ostentatious consumption seemed cruelly elitist during the Great Depression, which left its mark on my parents, albeit in reverse.

Likewise, after the Great Recession of 2008, garbage of all kinds began to appear excessive, ostentatious, brutal and stupid. Savings did not become a simple trend, but a value and a virtue for those who could manage it. The planet cannot forever endure the rapid and constant decline of its resources.

How can i see my father’s frugal habits now

Many people reproduce some of my father’s frugal habits. Every sensible person now wants to save electricity, because a large part of it still comes from fossil fuels. Everyone softens the faders.

I have come to see differently what I once thought of my father’s eccentricities. I approached him in spirit.

Since he gave me his pots, my own store in the basement has managed his nail collection and I build on the heritage.

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Recently, when I mentioned the end of the soap, a close friend said with a smile that she was only a little embarrassed: “How are you doing this?”