Thursday, February 9, 2012

Our First Meal

Our first night in our little bungalow was very memorable.  Edward had allotted me ten dollars to buy groceries for the week.  I spent a little over nine dollars and managed to fill the cupboards fairly well - again, remember this was a very long time ago.  Between a few wedding gifts and some donated books of trading stamps we had managed to have some basic dishes, glasses (the ones I had to grab every time the train went by), silverware, and pots and pans.  The only problem was that we did not have a can opener or sharp knife.  I had planned to have potatoes and corn with some kind of meat (too long ago to remember what kind) but I had no knife to peel the potatoes or can opener for the corn.  What to do?  What to do?

Being the ingenious woman that I am I searched until I found an old army can opener for the corn - the kind that takes you eleven and a half minutes to open one can and I scrubbed the potatoes and cooked them with the peels on.  A little salt and butter and hubby was none the wiser for my turmoil.   

Since Edward had worked his way up to assistant manager at the grocery store we were often the recipients of  "gifts" from the store and its vendors.  Sometimes it was in the form of dented and unlabeled cans, some display item like the colander (from a macaroni company) that I still have, and finally an old knife from a sympathetic butcher, I still have that too.  The neighborhood children loved it once a month when an dairy vendor would give Edward an entire case of ice cream.  We had a very small refrigerator with the smallest freezer compartment I have ever seen.  There was no way we could eat all that ice cream so we passed it out.  We were the most popular people in the neighborhood, with the kids anyway.

A long time has past since then and if you could see my house now you would wonder why someone with so much experience living as minimally as possible would ever end up in the house we live in now.  But, again, that's a story for another blog.

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