My Mother the Pinchpenny

pinchpenny MY MOTHER the (and early environmentalist)

ESSAY BY LAURA D. ROOSEVELT

My mother emerged from the Depression, World War Two, and rationing, as a young woman who believed that it was possible — noble, even — for people to get by with a lot less than they thought they needed. My parents had money, but my father could be a bit of a tightwad. Faced with the restrictive “allowance” he gave her for managing household expenses, my mother economized, cut corners, and got creative. She learned to abhor waste of any kind, including wasted effort: Believing that there was always something in the house that needed to be carried from one room to another, she came up with the catchphrase “Never go anywhere empty-handed.” There was always something — today’s mail, a couple of rolls of toilet paper — sitting at the top or the bottom of the staircase, waiting to be carried one way or the other by whoever might next be going in the appropriate direction.

Self-reliant and resourceful, she learned to do things herself rather than pay others to do them. She rewired broken lamps. She repainted rooms. She kept chickens for eggs and meat, and grew much of our produce in her own vegetable garden, making sure to plant crops ample enough to allow for canning for the winter. She learned to sew, and made much of our clothing, griping about having to buy my school uniforms, which she considered overpriced. When she bought clothing for herself, it was always on sale, and if someone admired one of her evening gowns, she’d take pride in announcing that she’d found it marked down three times at Loehmann’s.

Food in our house almost never went into the trash. Another of my mother’s catchphrases was “use-uppa,” a sort of mantra having to do with odds and ends in the fridge that might go bad if left too long. If two spears of uneaten broccoli from last night’s dinner reappeared in tonight’s salad, my mother would proudly proclaim, “Use-uppa!” My siblings and I use this term ourselves now, and maybe our kids will one day, too. My mom candied citrus rinds and gave them as gifts. She stored vegetable peelings and chicken bones in a plastic bag in the freezer until it was time to use them to make a chicken stock. After that, they went into the compost, along with coffee grounds, eggshells, Laura Roosevelt’s mother, right, recycled her own (second) wedding dress for her daughter's wedding a year later. Laura, then 18, is on the left. and other organic kitchen waste. Grass clippings from lawnmowing, pulled weeds, raked leaves, and shredded newspaper were also compost fodder, as was hair harvested from our hairbrushes and the cat brush. (“It’s full of nutrients!” my mother swore, and she was right: Hair contains traces of up to 14 different elements, including gold.) If a tree died on our property, it became wood for our fireplace. If something arrived in a wooden crate, the crate was broken down for kindling. Old newspapers were used to start the fire, except for the Washington Post’s colorful Sunday comics section (the “funny papers”), which my mother repurposed as wrapping for Christmas and birthday presents. Sometime in the 1970s, my mother became an avid environmentalist, which synched nicely with her frugal habits. Continued on page 58