Ruby the Conservative

When Ruby Irene Johnson (1921 - 2010) was a girl growing up in her childhood home, the family she was raised in was always poor. The housing for the family for many years was a ramshackle abode, often provided as part of an employment agreement. At times it was little more than a shack at the edge of the fields. Grandma Mabel worked hard making whatever accommodations they had to live in, into a home. This was part of the task she embraced to care for her husband and twelve children. All heroically accomplished during an era of time when keeping house was hard physically and demanded acquired homemaking skills, such as sewing clothing for the family, growing and preserving food, butchering, making soap, and making or doing without many household items taken for granted today. Grandpa Forest Johnson worked hard doing agricultural work. Most of his work life he labored in the Valley of the Sun in Arizona. He was regularly employed in cotton and produce fields, or in the citrus orchards. With a house full of kids, when any of the children became old enough to glean cotton, pull weeds, or carry a hoe or shovel, then they were also expected to work in the fields. Ruby had some health condition which caused her severe headaches while working in the hot sun in the Phoenix Valley so, whenever she was excused from work in the fields she was put to cleaning, washing, mending and other chores around the house full of growing children. Laundry was done in a washtub outside the home. If any article of clothing or linen got a hole in it, it was patched and put back into use until it was no longer patchable. Then it was cleaned and put to use as a dishrag, dishtowel, or something else. Material was too valuable to just throw away. Their lifestyle included a common virtue of the era, which has been summed up in the phrase “Use it up, wear it out, make it due, or do without”. Conservation for them, was not part of a political agenda; it was a survival necessity. Ruby had these values, and habits, ingrained in her makeup from early childhood and carried them throughout her life. There is no doubt Andy and Ruby adored each other and had a marriage made for Eternity but they still struggled with differences from time to time. Mother has told this story on herself of what happened one day after decades working on their family together. Dad came into the bedroom one day as mother was putting the now clean but patched up sheets onto their bed. Dad looked in the linen closet, and observed the set of new looking sheets that apparently had been there for quite a while. Likely thinking time was long past due, to put this new set into service. I can imagine Dad having purchased the set of linen, “for Mother”, which, was really as much, for himself as her. Perhaps he was weary of sleeping on mended linen. Perhaps he was also wondering how few years he might have left to possibly enjoy something new. Indicating the new sheets in the closet, Dad asked Mother, “What are you saving these for? Your next husband?” I believe the new sheets were put on the bed right then and the old sheets were no doubt put to use somewhere else.