Growing up my brother and I had to do many items of yard work using a wheelbarrow my father had taken from his father who had pulled it out of someone’s trash in 1939. Eventually my brother and I had real landscaping part-time jobs in high school and realized just how painful our wheelbarrow was and bought my dad a new one.
To be clear my grandfather was basically a farmhand from Bavaria with an 8th grade education who found himself in NYC in 1936 to marry his sweetheart and get the heck out of Germany.
Re:Hoarding
by sheepscreek on Friday June 02, 2023 @06:43PM
(#36171795)
I still lack that self-awareness, sigh. Happy for you though!
The times and circumstances meant a lot of fixing, and creating. You didn't throw stuff away, it could be useful, and usually was.
He was successful, had a good career, lived in a big house, but never lost the urge to build, recycle, fix and so on. When the oven door broke after 30 years he replaced it with a spare one he had in the garage. [1].
From him I learned to despise waste. I don't like throwing stuff away. But I'll happily give stuff away. And we live far enough up the food chain that there's always someone happy to take my broken junk and turn it into money.
I've come to learn that I don't have my father's desire, or time, to actually fix things, but I have his sense of not-waste. Sometimes it takes effort, but I try to make an effort to discard things that are truly past it, or at least pass them on to someone else.
Yes, I've inherited his sensibilities through genes and upbringing, but I've also become self-aware of it and so j recognise when it's happening.
[1] because his mothers stove broke years earlier, same model, and he kept the broken one for spare parts ;)