Channeling Grandma

I rinsed out the just emptied spice container and got ready to toss it. (As a 5, it is not a recyclable plastic in our town.) My Grandma Skatzes stopped me.

Not literally, of course. Grandma has been dead 22 years this month. But like many people who make a deep impact on my heart, she is still with me.

As a child in a multi-generational household, I spent many hours listening to my Grandma's stories. Many of her stories were about the Great Depression and how she and her family and, indeed, the whole community, got through those years.  She made sure her family was fed and clothed, and she did everything she could, on the precious few pennies she had to work with, to make sure neighbors did not do without either.

I have carried her stories with me for six decades. As an American history major in college, my greatest disappointment was I was never at a campus where a class on the 1930s was offered. My thesis was on Isaac Ingalls Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, and the treaty talks he held with tribes in that area of the world. It was a good, solid thesis, but what I really would have loved to write about would have been something along the lines of "Living Through the Great Depression: The American Homefront."

Over a decade before World War II brought the slogan to every home, Grandma lived by "Use it up, Wear it Out, Make it do or do without." That is what stayed my hand with the spice container. The uncertainty of what is ahead as we as a community, state, nation, and world go through this pandemic causes me to reassess what I need, what I do not need, and, yes, hang onto a few things that normally would have hit the trash or the recycling.

Or the yard waste pile, for that matter. Two months or so ago, while lazily talking out loud about this year's garden, I announced to Warren that I was going to dig out the sage plant that continues to winter over and produce each year. We don't use a lot of sage in this house and it takes up a lot of space, even with being cut back each spring.

The sage after being its pardon 

So when I started out to work in the garden this Saturday past, I was resolved to dig it up and be done with it. Then I looked again and thought of Grandma. And...ended up cutting it back but keeping it.

As it turns out, you can make pesto with sage. Really? I will be planting a large basil patch again for traditional basil pesto, but the thought of adding another type of pesto to my repertoire (and the freezer) delights me.

Thinking of you, Grandma.