Frugal

No one ever told me why Grandma Benson took her glass eye out every night or why it was in her head in the first place. I have both eyes, but only see with half of each eye. Fortunately, it’s the right half. So even though our partial blindness, well, was different, I always identified with her, because we were both frugal. We knew how to use what vision we did have to advantage.

When my parents fought over nothing and the house became frigid, I packed up my little red wagon and followed the cracked sidewalk over to grandma's for an extended stay. She never turned me away. Or said, “Where’s that stiff upper lip, kiddo. You belong at your own house.” No, grandma let me play shadow. I learned how to sleep in a cuddling S, so close our bodies breathed in unison. In a duet we jumped out of bed seconds before the alarm blare. With flowing Isadora Duncan movements we flounced the feather pillows, folded over the starched cotton sheet and straightened the limp chenille bed spread around the pillows.

I felt as though I looked into my future sitting across from grandma at the grey and white Formica kitchen table as we breakfasted on the everyday half of grapefruit, the bowl of Irish stone cut oatmeal, and sipped black coffee I shouldn’t be drinking at such a young age. Grandma let me. She accepted me exactly as I was.

Weekdays she sat at her cubby desk and dialed routine morning telephone calls to fellow Rebeccas, Royal Neighbors, Busy Bees, Eastern Stars, 4-H and Girl Scout leaders, and the shut-ins.—after listening to the farm report on the radio and making strategic calls to the corn futures broker and sometimes her banker. If she had been a man, she would have been a CEO. Instead she managed an Iowa corn farm and wore cotton print dresses.

Business over, she spent a few minutes on the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle published each week in the De Moines Register. She finished the puzzle and sent it in religiously for decades. I listened carefully to glean her networking skills. I read the hints Down and Across and decided I wasn’t cut out for trivia.

Grandma made a life from scratch: soap from lye and lard, deep-fried donuts in rendered bacon fat, her own patterns for her and her daughters’ dresses. She recycled and composted everything. Water from her eaves went into a cistern for bath and laundry. No water went down the kitchen drain.

At night after supper she carried the dish pan out the back screen door to the garden compost pile and flung the water over the fence in one graceful arc.