# What the Depression Taught My Grandmother About Enough

2026-06-22 · English
#depression-era #poverty #grandmother #enough #resilience

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She kept the rubber bands from the newspaper and the twist ties from bread bags in a drawer in the kitchen. When she died, we found forty years of them in there — rubber bands gone brittle, twist ties rusted at the edges. My mother threw them away and then cried for a long time.

My grandmother grew up during the Depression in rural Georgia. Her father was a tenant farmer. Some years the crop came in. Some years it didn't. She told me once that she wore the same dress to school four days out of five, and that the fifth day she washed it and wore her sister's.

She never threw anything away that might be useful later. She reused tinfoil until it fell apart. She kept buttons from shirts that had disintegrated. She made soup from bones twice before she put them in the ground.

But here's what she told me that I've never forgotten: *"We didn't know we were poor. We thought everyone lived that way. It was only later I found out there was another way to live. And by then I didn't want it."*

She didn't mean poverty was good. She meant she'd learned something about enough that the people who came up easier never had to learn.