The thing about being poor is . . .

“The thing about being poor,” my friend Mitch is prone to say, “is that you never forget how to do it.” As he was growing up, Mitch – a fellow Missourian – had to go out and shoot something for dinner with some regularity.

“If it is a possum when you kill it,” his mother once told him, “dress it in the field so that it's a rabbit when it gets to the house.” Country people had pride. Eating rabbit was one thing, eating possum was another.

My father grew up in Kentucky and he knew about being poor, despite the fact that both his parents ended up with master's degrees. Mom was fairly well off by Coffee County, Georgia standards, which meant they had hogs to butcher, hides to cure, fat to render into soap.

When my sister cleaned out the family's house after Mom died, she found 500 or more aluminum foil pie tins, washed and saved for re-use. Aluminum foil got re-used, plasticine bread bags were re-used as sandwich bags, jeans were patched, there was an on-off switch on their shower so you didn't have to waste water while you soaped up.

Dad scrounged scrap lumber from the University's industrial education shop and made things – shelves, toys and knicknacks – out of it. He wasn't cheap, he wasn't poor, he just couldn't bear to see anything wasted.

Later in life he fell in with the environmental movement only because conserving, recycling and re-using was a way of life with him. His vegetable garden was a raised bed, all of 20 square feet.  But it produced a mother lode of fresh veggies – and anything that was trimmed off or left over got composted and ultimately put back into the soil.

I've played at that kind of thing. After moving to my present home, I found some scrap lumber and built a couple of saw horses strong enough support an elephant seal, took a shipping pallet apart and built a raccoon proof cage for my compost (so they can't eat up all of the good stuff before the rats get to it) and a broom holder in which I take an inordinate amount of pride. Recently I moved the worm composter that I built this summer indoors to keep the little fellas warm and turning leftovers into soil for my 16 square foot vegetable garden.

We drive a Prius and yes, we average more than 40 miles per gallon. We wash and reuse the sandwich plastic bags with the zippers on top.

A handyman recently did some work remodeling our kitchen and built us a cabinet  using drawers left over from another project, and he used a piece of granite left over from another project to create a work surface. Now he's using the drawers from the cabinet he replaced in our kitchen as part of the closet organizer he's building for us – mostly out of re-used material.

A cousin of mine in Georgia is living in an amazing house built with beams and boards she and her husband salvaged from an old tobacco barn and an abandoned cabin on the family farm.

Mom's line about how they used to use everything from the pig except the squeal wasn't original, but it was close to the truth. Yes, Virginia, people do eat those parts of the pig. The parts that don't end up as pickled pigs feet, snoot, or chitterlings (chitlin's) are called sausage. And while hams grow on the south end of a north-bound hog, what about the extreme southern tip? Check out www.seriouseats.com/2008/05/how-to-cook-pig-tails.html – if you dare.

Mom used to cook her own chicken pot pies in those aluminum foil pans that originally came with the store-brand variety dad had bought on sale, five for-a-dollar, when she went back to college. Unlike the store brand, hers were good. Now my wife has taken to doing the same thing.

I spent the first half of my life trying not to turn into my parents. Now it seems that I'm spending the last half trying to catch up to them.