In praise of moving and thrift

I know it. You are thinking that “she only moves to grab the remote.”

And, to be truthful, the aging process has made mobility more of a challenge than it was even five years ago.

But, immobility is boring and tiring, I have had to find ways to move about that takes my limitations into account.

I take the stairs most times one at a time, holding on to the railing.

I can remember running up those same stairs two at a time.  Long walks over uneven ground requires that I carry a cane.

My laundry baskets make it to the basement either via my spouse or by me but much, much less packed.

I may have to make two trips but that is better than not being able to get the dirty clothes there at all.  The sheets are packed into pillow cases and make their way southward by rolling down two flights of stairs.

It all gets done.

But moving means more than that.  It includes the ability and the desire to move about in your world in a productive way.

What I am saying is that I think of moving as something connected to living your life, not something that is separated-by-gym-clothes activity.

I have no problem with people who have made time in their days for “workouts.”

I’ve done this myself. In fact I found my gym time to be almost meditative.

That was then. This is now.

I have this feeling that I need to be better connected to the world around me.

I have more time and I want that time to have a relationship to being here and creative on this earth.

So moving includes using the broom to sweep the kitchen floor. It also means that I sweep the rug in the family room.

I use a broom far more now because it gives me a connection to movement that using an elliptical doesn’t.

It also does a pretty good job. It’s the way my grandmother kept house. It’s the way she taught me. My grandmother knew something about the rhythm of living on this earth.

In some respects everything old is new again. At least as far as the women’s magazines go.

This month Good Housekeeping has an extended feature about eliminating food waste.

Apparently we discard voluminous amounts of stuff because — well, because we can.

The editors at GH have laid out a colorful and interesting number of ideas, recipes and such to help those who have garbage pails full of unused food that end up in landfills and, in the process of decay, create greenhouse gasses.

Now, looking at me you just know that this is not nor has it ever been a problem in my house.

We eat everything, except for the odd deli stuff that my spouse sneaks in and forgets about.

I find these left over science projects in the fridge every once in a while.

But I was trained to use it all up in one way or another.

Left overs are legitimate meals in our house and the leavings of left overs can be made it into stews, soups, omelets, frittatas. The list goes on.

My spouse’s Italian heritage has brought even more ways to use things up.

There is this marvelous love of greens among the Italians that I find wonderful.

Greens is a general term that can include escarole as in Greens an Beans or Dandelion greens, or the pickings of the shoots of wild mustard or lambs ears, even milkweed.

Add some onions, garlc, olive oil and some parmesan cheese and YUM.

Last week, I picked up a bunch of radishes with their leaves attached.

The radishes were huge as were the leaves.

Yes, I cooked the leaves. They were delicious.

And in this vein, GH offers an unusual even for me way to use up something that I never considered to be an edible food item.

Did you know that you can make pesto out of carrot tops? I didn’t.

I’ll bet that you can make pesto out of any green thing if you add some basil and a lot of olive oil and parmesan cheese. Speaking of that ubiquitous Italian cheese, I keep a bag of parmesano reggiano rinds in the freezer to flavor soups.

My own English heritage has included rafts of similar thrifty uses of food.

Take a chicken. Mom would roast a chicken, saving the drippings to be used to make biscuits to go with the soup that she made from the backs, neck, wings and left overs.

Sad looking salad ingredients became soups and, just like GH recommends, my mother and grandmother saved bits and ends of veggies in containers in the fridge and later the freezer to add to those soups.

When we did get a freezer, no left over bone made it to the garbage, rather it joined the veggie bits to become part of a wonderful soup base.

My daughter now does the same.

Fruits on their way to the great beyond never made it.

In our house they became pies, crisps, toppings for puddings and something that my grandmother called fruit sauce that we would add to breakfast cereals.

The bottom of the cereal box where the crumbs of corn flakes and cheerios lived,  were added to casseroles for bulk or used to bread chicken.

Cereal boxes became magazine sleeves or the raw materials for crafting. The cellophane or plastic sleeve inside was carefully saved to store items in the fridge.  Cereal boxes came in. They never went out.

It was the same thing with clothing.

Both my mother and grandmother were expert seamstresses and most of our clothing was either entirely handmade or remade or altered by them.

Brand new fabric was a rarity. If they weren’t remaking something that one of us wore, they were tearing apart clothing they purchased at the Good Will to salvage the yard goods, the buttons and or the zippers.

When a particular item of clothing could no longer be remade, it was cut into pieces to become a quilt, using an old mattress pad as batting.

We learned something called thrift, not just the thrift that you associate with saving money but the thrift that makes a comment about how we life in this world, how we exercise living in a way that acknowledges that we are stewards of an earth where we are ultimately connected and responsible for those connections.