By: Sandy Williams Driver
One rainy afternoon, I emptied a plastic bag of old pictures onto my kitchen counter. I was searching for a specific photo of an uncle and instead found a piece of history that shaped my mother into the woman she has been her entire life.
The pages of faded stamps in the tattered War Ration books held no meaning for me, but Mom easily recalled what each one was originally used for. These were for sugar and those for coffee, she told me and continued to name an assortment of other products she remembered being rationed during World War II.
Ration books filled with stamp-sized coupons were issued by the government to consumers in the early 1940s. People surrendered a certain number of vouchers for each rationed item they bought. If their coupons were used up before that ration period ended, they couldn’t buy any more of that item until the next time they were issued.
It’s hard for me to imagine any product, especially food, being rationed. Born in the 1960s, I guess I could be called a child of luxury. I never had to pick a bag of cotton under the scorching Alabama sun nor wait until the crops were sold to get a new pair of shoes. I have never had to skip a meal so my children would have enough to eat and I have never slept in a house with cracks in the floor and walls. My mother has done all those things and more.
Ilene Morrow was born in 1930 to a poor sharecropper in north Alabama. She was the ninth child in the family and three more boys followed. She is what some folks call a Depression baby, innocently entering into a world of bankruptcy, foreclosures and ration stamps, and she has been conservative as long as I can remember.
Old habits die hard, they say, and many folks of that era still practice what they were taught as a child. I have sat beside my mother many times while she opens a beautifully wrapped package. She patiently removes the ribbon, wraps it neatly into a ball and then lays it on the table beside the store-bought bow. Next, she slips her rough hands under the small strips of clear tape and works them loose to reveal the box holding her gift inside.
As a child, I was never so tolerant when celebrating my special day. My short fingers eagerly ripped and tore at the obstacles separating me and my presents. While I exclaimed over a new toy, my mother was on hands and knees, picking up the hastily discarded paper and ribbon. When I asked why she was saving the scraps, she replied, There’s still plenty good left in them.
Growing up, I became accustomed to my mother reusing many items before the word recycle ever became a common household word. A piece of aluminum foil used to roll out homemade biscuit dough was meticulously wiped clean of any remnants, folded into a neat square and used at least three or four months before it became too riddled with holes to efficiently use any longer.
Mom used an empty Vienna sausage can, label removed and scrubbed, as a cookie cutter; empty butter bowls became containers to store leftovers in; and when the last trace of milk was gone from the jug, it was used either for a water pitcher or cut in half and used to plant seedlings in the spring. The empty egg cartons also made a good place to start tender plants in.
Empty bread wrappers became storage bags and empty grocery sacks became garbage bags. When one of her delicious homemade pies was eaten, the aluminum pie plate became a new baking dish. Bills and letters arrived almost daily in the mail box and the envelopes were opened carefully. I have seen many grocery lists written haphazardly around postage stamps, addresses and moistened flaps.
The fashion models from the pages of Sears and Roebuck became my paper dolls that came complete with a shoebox full of furniture compliments of the household section in the back of the catalog.
The soft homemade quilts that covered our beds were pieced together from bits and pieces of striped blouses, flannel gowns and denim overalls. They were beautiful and kept me warm and snug at night as well as providing many hours of remember this shirt? or remember that dress?
Leftovers were always eaten in our house and daily showers were short and tepid. Doctor visits were reserved for broken limbs or immunizations and unoccupied rooms in our house were never lighted, heated or cooled. A backyard vegetable garden was a necessity of life and canning or freezing the surplus filled our summer days.
In addition to saving household items, Mom also saved treasured pieces of yesterday. Tucked away in drawers and chests are pale white christening gowns, tiny porcelain teeth and snippets of baby fine hair. She has old black and white photographs of children sitting on sagging wooden porches and young men with brave smiles and frightened eyes attired in crisp Army uniforms. She kept newspaper clippings of obituaries, winter storms and an announcement of a little girl winning a coloring contest.
Stacked neatly in an oak dresser, she has cherished aprons with a sprinkling of White Lily flour nestled in the corners of the pockets, thin handkerchiefs boasting hand stitched initials and dried tears, and soft leather Bibles with tattered pages bearing dates of marriages and deaths.
Waste not, want not, has been my mothers mantra since I can remember. We were never wealthy when I was growing up, but we weren’t poor either. Mom was just frugal; a lingering trait from her own childhood filled with a daily dose of rationing. Some people might use many words to describe my mother: thrifty, prudent, stingy, miserly and penny-pinching. I call the little girl who once played with corn-shuck dolls and woke up on Christmas morning to paper sacks of apples and oranges a survivor.
Published U.S. Legacies May 2004
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