"Brought it from Canada"

"See these shoes?" asked my father-in-law once, holding up the item in question. "I brought them from Canada." An noteworthy accomplishment for a pair of shoes, I had to agree, especially as he was not holding them up to put in the Goodwill bag.  Rather it was Christmas eve, and they were on his feet.  The family had left Canada some 30 years earlier, and who knew how long he had them while he lived there?

Reduce, re-use and recycle. It is a lauded mantra of today, and we are composting and keeping separate bins for our trash, recycled items, and compost.  

My husband, Hans, is the master of saving things to use at a later time.  The windows, doors and cupboards in his shop used to be our kitchen.  Countless times, he has needed to fix something and he will come up with some ingenious little repair using hardware he saved from another project.  He pulled out the kitchen counter tops from our rental when we installed new ones, and now look what he did with them, built shelving for our garage.  Costco supplies now have a home:

There are lots of things in the garden to compost, summer corn stalks can eke out a month more usefulness as decoration:

My fabric scraps are piling up and I recently learned how to make a rag rug.  I'm not finished with it yet, but it will look nice in the guest room on the hardwood floor:

I cherish the memory of my father-in-law and his thriftiness.  I applaud that his needs were few and he did not need a lot of things to make him feel blessed.  They took care of what they did have and thus threw very little away.  What a wonderful example for his son.  It speaks of monogamy.   My husband can keep some old rusty hardware and finds a thrill making it useful.  A comforting thought as one gets old and raggedy.