If you were raised by anyone who went through the Depression in the South, there are things you never throw away. Whether you’ll ever need them or not.

My grandparents often talked about the Great Depression. It was a time, as they put it, “When everyone had nothing.”

Since neither side of my family had much before the Depression, it would seem that the worst economic downturn in American history made things worse.

My mom’s parents lived in a small area between Fomby and Hopewell, Arkansas. These communities would be considered suburbs of Ashdown, Arkansas, if Ashdown had ever had suburbs.

The Beverly Hillbillies had Hooterville and Bug Tussle. We had Fomby and Hopewell.

My dad’s family lived between Wallace and Foreman, Arkansas. Fomby, Hopewell, Wallace, and Foreman are all in Little River County, but since no one could afford a car; they might as well have been in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Lithuania.

I have no idea where Lithuania is; I’ve just always liked the way it sounds when I say it.

The point is, that when you’re broke, you’re broke. And when you’re broke, you get creative. Very creative.

This creativity still permeates my household today.

For example, rich folks have an assortment of fancy, matching Tupperware. We have an assortment of Country Crock and Greek Yogurt containers.

Instead of throwing away food properly, we wait until it completely disintegrates inside an unlabeled container and then we throw it away.

During the Depression, if you were lucky enough to have a piece of store-bought furniture, you were uptown.

The word “store-bought” is a coveted Southern adjective that refers to something you didn’t make yourself. The word, “uptown” refers to uptown. No one’s ever told me what that means.

My family never rids itself of furniture. It is forcibly willed onto younger family members until it completely falls apart. We have living room side tables floating around that still have the scars of errant non-filter Lucky Strikes that belonged to folks who departed us during the Eisenhower Administration.

Some families brag about sourdough starter that their families have nurtured and used for over a hundred years to feed their broods by making bread. My family has bacon grease.

Southerner’s never toss bacon grease. It is the liquid life of the South. We cook everything in it. And just like sourdough starter, you add to it to keep it going. Rumor has it that some of the drippings we are using to fry potatoes today helped clog the arteries of my ancestors long before my cardiologist was ever born.

And just like my cardiologist will bequeath her land to her children, my kids will get the grease.

One area where I’ve shifted from my family’s early ways is bread bags. On the rare occasion that my ancestors could afford to buy bread instead of making it, they never threw away the bread bag. Bread bags were the precursor to Country Cock containers.

I can remember my great grandmother washing and hanging up bread bags to dry. She never threw one away. There must’ve been hundreds of those things found in her house after she was gone.

My family absolutely does not hoard bread bags. We do that with plastic grocery bags.

We will never need all of the grocery bags that we’ve amassed, but if the country ever experiences a plastic grocery bag shortage on the scale of the pandemic toilet paper scare, you’ll see me on TV.

They’ll have me center stage receiving an award for dragging all of our bags out of the kitchen drawers and then loading them into trucks that in turn haul them away to replenish America.

Another thing you inherit in a Southern family is understanding and passing on the importance of the cast iron. We cook just about everything in cast iron, and whatever we cook is put out on the table for family and company to share.

I remember reading once that when George Washington’s mom passed away, her one important possession the family wanted was her cast iron.

During the Depression, my family didn’t have much, but they had cast iron. The skillets, Dutch ovens, and other pieces were highly prized. They still are.

When we recently packed up and moved my mom, we wrapped each piece of cast iron inside a plastic grocery bag. We’ll get the cast iron out soon and coat each in some vintage bacon grease before we reheat something from a Country Crock container.

Whatever we cook, we’ll put it on the side table that has the cigarette burns. Help yourself, but be careful of that table. It might be valuable. It may have come from Lithuania.

 

©2024 John Moore

John’s books, Puns for Groan People and Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, are available on his website TheCountryWriter.com, where you can also send him a message.