When is it imfrugal to be frugal?
When to save money, you (by you I mean me) buy in bulk 500 white business-size envelopes. You proceed to use maybe 50 a year. Summer comes. It’s real hot and muggy. The glue melts. The flaps on the envelopes all stick. That’s year one. So for the next nine years (give or take), you (by you I mean me) have to pry open each flap with your fingernails (or a knife), usually tearing the envelope in the process. Then you insert your letter and tape the flap closed. It’s annoying and time consuming.
I mention this because I’m almost out of envelopes. Down to my last 30 or so. By August, they’ll be gone, and I can buy new ones to lick and stick. Now that’’s something to look forward to in the new year.
On the other hand, maybe 20 years ago, when my dad still worked for a wholesale food company, he scored me a case of lard, maybe fifty plastic tubs, at a very reasonable wholesale price. I needed the lard to make bread in the tin bread mixer I inherited from my grandmother. Using her recipe, three loaves call for eight tablespoons of lard. Grammie’s bread is delicious. For a while I made bread quite often, but gradually got out of the habit. Last count, there were 15 tubs of lard waiting their turn in my freezer. This winter, New Year’s resolution, I’m going to make Grammie’s bread once a week. Or so.
And lose weight.
Hmmm. May have to choose one or the other. Grammie’s delicious bread or lose weight? What a conundrum.
Years ago, after the Beans of Egypt, Maine first made a big splash, author Carolyn Chute, then and now a rural Mainer, taught a couple of courses at the University of New Hampshire, where I was also teaching. I’ll never forget seeing her in the hall with her student papers in her Maine briefcase, which was a large cereal box. And, on an occasion or two, when she dropped me a postcard, the postcard was, in fact, an index card. Clever! And frugal. She’s got a new book out, The School on Heart’s Content Road. Great article about her and the book and her husband and Scottish Terriers in the New York Times. Click here to read it.
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