When I moved to Maine in 1974, I thought I had stepped back a generation, into a time my mother used to tell me about as she recalled her childhood in rural Illinois.
My next-door neighbor, Ethel Carlson, only recently had stopped weaving her own rag rugs on the Swedish loom in her corner bedroom. She’d spent evenings cutting the rags — once clothes — into strips and tying them together for use as the weft on the loom warped with sturdy cotton or linen string.
The life of a rag rug in Ethel’s house began in a bedroom or hallway or on the stairs. It moved to the kitchen when it became a little worn, then to the front or back doorway and finally to the shed, where the dog might scratch it into a bed for the night.
In the days before secondhand stores and sanitary landfills, a garment was not discarded just because it was faded, torn, out of style or outgrown. It had a long tour of duty in the household. The total amount of waste leaving that household was so small it could be accommodated in a family dump someplace on the farm.
I was reminded of Ethel’s rag rugs when I read a new book by Glenna Johnson Smith of Presque Isle. “Old Maine Woman: Stories from the Coast to the County” contains more than 30 essays and stories representing three places the popular Aroostook County writer has lived in during her 90 years: Hancock County, Aroostook County and her imagination.
A native of Ashville, Maine, Smith grew up in the 1920s, and one of the essays from that period in her life is titled “String Too Short to Save.” She recalls the old joke: “What’s in this box, Emma?” “String too short to save,” and declares that could have been written about her mother, Kathleen Proctor Johnson.
“When a much-patched dress was too worn to wear, Mama saved the buttons, snaps, buckles and hooks and eyes. Then for future quilts, she cut up any pieces that still held together. In later years she never could understand why people bought new cloth for quilt making. The whole point of quilting was to get something beautiful and warm from discards.”
To this day, Smith can’t discard a garment without first cutting off the buttons. She can point to four quart jars full of buttons on her bookcase as evidence.
Kathleen Johnson patched and darned white sheets and tablecloths until they were no longer usable. Then she washed and ironed them, cut them into pieces and packed them away to be used as bandages in an emergency.
“They were really rags before they could be called dust rags,” Smith writes. “Once a young family was burned out and Mama’s old soft white pieces served for diapers, crib sheets and handkerchiefs.”
She took a cloth bag to the grocery store and her own dish to the butcher and the fish man, so there were no disposable wrappings. Table scraps went to the neighbor’s pig or were thrown into a little pit behind the house.
“What the small animals and birds didn’t eat became compost. Out of that little pile grew the biggest blackberries in town.”
Because Smith’s mother grew and canned her own vegetables and pickled and preserved her own fruit and berries, they had few tin cans to discard. Lard and peanut butter came in little tin pails used forever for berry-picking.
“I tell myself, something must have been thrown out,” Smith writes of her family home. “Not shoes, because Papa learned to put on soles and heels. Not old pots and pans with holes in them — they could be patched. Not old magazines — they were given to shut-ins. The waste paper was needed to build the three wood fires.”
She was inspired to write “String Too Short to Save” as she watched the garbage truck move from home to home on her street in Presque Isle.
“I could imagine my mother’s scowl of disapproval,” she said, watching the noisy machine chew her week’s accumulation of trash. “I can’t recall from my childhood in the 1920s that we had any garbage to speak of.”
What a difference a generation makes. My years as Ethel and Albin Carlson’s neighbor included a stint as editor of the weekly newspaper in Caribou. I could not help but appreciate their thrift as I observed waste disposal become front-page news more often than any other topic.
From sophisticated wastewater treatment plants to fines against potato processors for polluting the river to creation of a new tri-community landfill, waste management was a major expense to the city and its businesses. We wrote features on the city’s first “garbologist” and on the first redemption center for bottles and cans. (The idea was new to those who could not remember when milk came in bottles that were sterilized and reused by dairies and farmers.)
Today, more than 30 years later, we are still rediscovering what the Carlsons and the Johnsons did instinctively.
“But they were poor,” some say. “They had to conserve; they had no choice.”
Do we?
Glenna Johnson Smith will sign copies of “Old Maine Woman: Stories from the Coast to the County” (published by Islandport Press of Yarmouth) at 6 p.m. today at the Presque Isle library and at 11 a.m. Nov. 13 at Mr. Paperback in Caribou.
Kathryn Olmstead is a retired University of Maine associate dean and associate professor living in Aroostook County. She was the founding director of the Maine Center for Student Journalism at UMaine. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She may be reached by e-mail at kathryn.olmstead@umit.maine.edu.