By Susan K. Boyd MS, MFT
When I first moved to the Central Coast I remember asking, “What do I put in that big, blue barrel?” I came from the San Joaquin valley and we did not have recycling barrels to take to the curb. It wasn’t long before I noticed that big, blue barrel filled up twice as fast as the gray one. Knowing I was wasting less made me feel good. I remember watching my mother conserve, before it was ever popular or cool. She was not trying to save the environment. She was trying to save money, time, resources, and energy (hers and ours not PG &E’s), all because of her conservation ethic that she explained as, simply, ‘The Scott in me. “
You don’t have to have a Scottish heritage to save and not waste. You just have to have a good reason, to do both, and be invested. My mother was a young teenager during the Great Depression, when she, and everyone else, pinched pennies and understood the phrase, “Use it up and wear it out.” Thousands of people were out of work and stood in soup lines around the country. The cliché, “Waste not-want not,” was a reality that people understood.
When World War II hit home in the 1940s, it changed the way the whole world used resources. My mom and dad were married, and as she waited for my dad to come back from fighting in the Pacific, mom experienced a new kind of conserving, called rationing.
By the time my brother and I came along, a few years later, life was easier for my parents. The national economy was on the upward swing. People became consumers on an unprecedented level. Yet I noticed that even though my friends’ parents tossed things in the trash, in our house, my mother was repurposing those same items. She washed, dried and reused aluminum foil. Little pieces of leftover, bars of soap were melted into one amazing, multicolored ball. She cut buttons off of worn out shirts and kept them in a button can, and cut the shirts up to be used as dust rags. Imagine my horror, as a 13 year old, girl, seeing my torn underwear in the ragbag, knowing it would soon be used to polish the furniture. (I made an ongoing inventory of the ragbag after that!)
Today, our state is going through a record breaking draught. Unlike the Great Depression or World War, not everyone in our country is experiencing what we are in California. And each county and city has to decide what the restrictions and limitations will be. Some cities are even rationing water.
So I am going to try and remember what I learned from the lady of the house where I lived as a child. She did not know about recycling or what it meant to be ‘green’. My mother lived the same way through the good times and the hard times; saving and not wasting were simply values she lived by. She did it because she thought it was the right thing to do. And that is the psychology of conserving.
Susan K. Boyd is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in private practice in SLO. She can be reached for counseling at (805) 782-9800 or by email: . Also see www.susankboydmft.com.
