On Monday mornings I sit with three elderly women and do hand work in the cozy library of their assisted living home. They’re residents, I’m the Activities Director, and this stitching circle is an activity that they like. The oldest is a hundred and the youngest 91, which makes me the spring chicken. While one embroiders, another knits perfect cotton dishcloths and the centenarian crochets blankets like nobody’s business.
While these are worthy projects, it’s the conversation they come for. There’s gossip of course, spiced with a few complaints that I file under the heading “cussin’ and discussin,” but it’s the polishing of old memories from the Great Depression that animate them most.
One day, after sharing tips on how to best dry corn for succotash - one swore by laying it on a stone wall to air dry in the sun - these thrifty Vermont ladies blew me away with stories about feed bag fashion. That is, making clothes from empty feed and flour sacks, a practice so widespread during the twenties and thirties that grain producers caught on and began shipping their products in patterned bags. Sturdy chicken feed sacks began arriving in general stores in colorful prints - flowers, checks and stripes - perfect material for dresses, skirts and aprons.
The ladies assured me that these 100% cotton bags, prized by cash strapped homemakers, made clothes that “wore like iron.” And their math was simple: two matching fifty-pound feed sacks and a piece of elastic yielded one skirt. The key word here is matching. Manufacturers changed designs frequently, so it was critical to buy two bags of grain at a time to ensure that a dress could be completed in the same fabric. With the company label designed to wash out, these patterned feed sack dresses and skirts became a kind of ration fashion at a time of great scarcity.
My ladies knew a thing or two about recycling long before it became standard practice - because they had to. Their early lives, circumscribed by scarcity, created habits of thrift they can’t seem to break more than seventy-five years down the road. The hundred year-old still saves all the bits and pieces of leftover yarn to crochet into multicolored afghans because she can’t bear to waste them. My stitching ladies are anachronisms surrounded by a culture of excess.
But there’s one frugal habit from the war years that they all confided was a pleasure to finally give up - mending the runs in their precious silk stockings. Now it’s pantyhose or sensible socks, and to heck with the mending.
