Ripe

My mom is a bargain junky. Correction, my mom is a self-identified bargain junky. It is the kind of thing that happens to a single parent struggling to make ends meet. She has always worked an insane number of hours. Even now she has two jobs one in town and one three hours away.

I vividly remember her coming home in the evenings laden with an odd assortment of groceries. My sister and I would help her put away the week’s food goods. Three bags of Twizlers, 3 dozen eggs, 2 bottles of pineapple salsa, 4 frozen pie crusts, 24 cans of diet seltzer water, 4 lbs of ground round and a bag of ice later we would wonder, in earnest, what the hell we were going to eat for dinner.

We were the kind of family that would have an excess of tube socks to wear but not a single socially acceptable pair of running shoes amongst us. We had toilet paper, paper towels, canned goods and huge white bloomers coming out the wazoo, but a decided lack of functioning motor vehicles. Though I am sure that if carburetors and fan belts went on sale or were available in bulk we would have an entire shelf of them in the garage.

When I moved home recently I found no fewer than 18 identical Eddie Bauer edition Nalgene bottles in the overstuffed kitchen cabinets. I asked my mom, the midwife, why she had so many water bottles. She said, “They were on sale.” And that was the full extent of her rationale.

My sister, the advertising executive, told me recently that she personally witnessed the storing of three, yes three, turkey ovens. These are not turkey trays that one puts in their normal oven, but rather self-contained miniature electric ovens that are designed for the express purpose of cooking a turkey, not a chicken, not vegetables, a turkey, or in our case three turkeys, without tying up the oven.

My mom once told me while we unloaded a trunk-full of sale hostas, “I have to spend a little money to save a lot.” Over the years my sister and I have tried to point out to her that if she were to say SAVE that little money upfront she might be able to invest it in quality, long-life products or (dare I dream) in stocks or bonds, but she has no interest.

The truth is she shops as a hobby. I have seen her on multiple occasions go to a friend’s house and look through mail-order catalogues for hours while everyone else drinks coffee or discusses the recent happenings in their lives. Sometimes, if she is on her way to visit a friend that doesn’t have the social sense to keep catalogues out for guests to peruse she will bring a stack of her own.

In an average week we will receive 10-20 catalogues and 3-10 magazine and professional journals. The journals go unopened, still in the plastic, into a box for ‘reference.’ The magazines go to the bathroom next to the toilet for ‘thumbing through.’ The catalogues go straight to the living room table where they are read until the ink is worn from the cover and the pages go limp and ragged.

Our mailman has the daily charge of getting all of her catalogues to fit in the box with the door closed. Occasionally he pulls his truck over and delivers the mail directly to the front door. I am sure this is a time saving activity. Several of our neighbors have opted out of getting our mail for her when she is out of town because “It takes up too much space.”

Recently my mom found a ‘lovely’ pop up greenhouse on sale in a gardening catalogue she subscribes to. I am thinking that this is what led her into her stint as a community gardener. New vegetable gardeners always fall into a certain trap. This is a kind of trap that my mom is prone to. The thinking goes like this. For the same price as a tomato I can buy a plant that will grow a bunch of tomatoes. For the price of a tomato plant I can buy a pack of seeds that will grow a row of tomato plants. All I have to do is a little prep work, some watering and viola, I will have a assload of tomatoes for the price of one.

Yeah, we pay farmers to do this for us for a reason. It is efficient.

So, this past spring before the frost lifted, I helped my mom put a million little seeds into seed starting packs. We put the seeds into the popup greenhouse. It was my job to make sure they were watered regularly while my mom was away working. She rented two community garden plots. One was here in town, the other was close to her work in Poughkepsie.

For a few months this spring my girlfriend and I would spend what should have been lazy, post cloital Saturday mornings riding up to the town dump with my mom. A couple of years ago she discovered there was free compost at the dump while saving money by hauling her own trash.

For most people trash day is a day during the week in which you have to remember to cart your waste to the curb before getting on with the rest of your life. In our house trash day is literally an entire day spent going to the dump.

My mom, unlike my girlfriend and me, loves trash day. Here is how it works. We load her old rotting Pathfinder, or as she drawls it, ‘the truuck,’ up with nasty, leaking, maggot infested, week-old bags of trash, some shovels and boxes of out-dated catalogues. We then drive 20 miles out into the country to the county landfill. At the entrance to the dump we pull over at the recycling bins and dispose of the catalogues. Then we get in line with all the dump “truucks” and wait our turn to weigh-in. After weighing-in we drive 300 yards to the ‘household waste’ containers. There are also containers for scrap metal, tires, batteries and refrigerators. We unload the trash. Then we would circle around again to the entrance and get back into line to be weighed. We pay on average two dollars to the lady in the window at the scale. My mom has become acquaintances with this gal in the way many people come to know their butcher or hairdresser. The lady gives us our receipt and a treat for our dog through the little metal drawer of propriety under the window. Then we would circle around yet again to the compost area and load the back of the truck with an insane amount of steaming bio matter while the dog scarves down her treat.

After loading up we treat ourselves to lunch at a local country farm. The thinking here is that we have saved so much money hauling our own garbage that we deserve a treat. The reality is we were always freaking hungry after all the shoveling. We take turns going into the farm store restroom to clean the trash ooze and compost dirt from under our nails. We eat out on the front porch and the dog usually gets another treat.

After lunch we go out to the farm orchards and pick a couple of bushels of whatever fruit or berry is in season. This is much more cost effective, according to my mom, than buying 1/2 ripe fruit at the super market. The copious amount of fruit is taken home and flash frozen for use in smoothies and pies hopefully to be accompanied by three turkeys. (There is currently so much frozen, freshly-picked fruit in our freezer that we can’t fit anything else in.) By the time we drive the 20 miles back to town it was usually well into the afternoon. My girlfriend would take her leave of us. And my mom would head out to her local garden plot where she would spend the rest of the day light hours fastidiously preparing immaculate rows of well-composted soil for her seedlings.

I don’t know who enjoyed trash days more my mom or my treat-laden puppy. While my mom was busy saving money and working on her little projects my puppy got to go to all the stinkiest parts of town. One day I turned around to check on my pup in the back of our compost-filled truck just as she squatted down and took a leak on the crest of her own private, motorized bathroom. None of us bothered to try and correct this behavior. After all, she was peeing in the dirt and the ‘truck’ already reeked from months and months of hauling rubbage. (My mom has asked me to point out that she put a plastic tarp under the compost.) The puppy loved it when we would unload the compost and she would frequently jump in and help with the digging. My mom usually left half of the compost in the truck to take with her later in the week when she drove to work and the pup would laze atop her kingdom of stench.

All-in-all my mom probably would have broken even on her community garden plots if it hadn’t been for The Flood and the ensuing state of emergency. The thing is commercial farms aren’t usually built in places like flood plains. Years of stealing land and ideas from the Indians has taught us where and where not to attempt to build farms. So low-lying areas that flood often become things like parks and they sport prime soil for community gardens. The amazing thing is that the garden here in town didn’t actually flood, her plot was above the flood line. The road leading to the garden did flood, however. We would drive by the park on the highway and watch day after day as the carefully constructed rows got more and more overgrown until after a few weeks the plants began to die off. By the time we could get back in the crops were pretty much a wash. Her out-of-town garden did flood. She was hoping to replant, but when she went to inspect her plot it was littered with dead, bloated rats. That pretty much marked the end of the growing season.

I asked her if she was planning on planting a community garden again next year. She said, “Actually, I have been thinking about a raised bed for that back corner of the yard that gets all the evening sun.” I can already see the whole process repeating itself. This time with the added excitement of hauling lumber and irrigation tubes.

My mom recently leased a new car. I know what you are thinking: LEASED? But because she is a midwife she can deduct “every penny” come tax time. In her mind deducting expenses, giving the government an interest-free wartime loan, is a better deal than saving money up front. She refused to trade in the truck. It is almost completely rusted out. It needs new brakes. It needs new everything, but I know she was thinking.

“Yes, I might get five hundred for trading this vehicle in, but just imagine how much I am going to save on tomatoes next year.“

In her defense there is nothing quite as wonderful as a perfectly ripe piece of fruit. Especially when you are related to it.