NO GARAGE SALES-LAND OF WASTE
How do people learn not to waste, to make do, to conserve things and save them for a time when they might be needed? I am not sure, but that is just the way I am. My family was not that way when I was growing up-they would throw things out that they might even need to buy again later because they could not be bothered keeping track of “stuff.” I learned not to leave things that I valued at my parent’s house because they would just be thrown out at the next general cleaning, or one of my younger siblings would end up with them if they were at all “cool.” Then again, we did not have much of value to waste.
I thought about this the other day when I pondered what to do with some of the stuff we have accumulated here. I know value is in the eyes of the beholder, and some of this stuff looks pretty useful. Every time I would ask people here what they do with things they do not want anymore, they answer that if they can’t give it away, they just throw things out. So when we moved in almost three years ago we asked around and found willing homes for duplicate kitchen items and bed pillows, some love seats, and a bed and we know they are all used all of the time. We have even been known to take a perfectly good beach umbrella off of the junk heap once! But this is several years later and there are still things we do not use just sitting in storage places around the apartment.
We are also used to the giving and taking that comes with food stuff. We are constantly given fruits and vegetable from people’s gardens, and then often pass that on to others when it gets to be too much for us to handle. This weekend we passed on white grapes to Giusi and Franco after deciding we did not have enough to stomp for wine, but almost! This bounty of grapes came along with melons and a small pumpkin from Toto and Ana we have a small family farm and always have too much when the crop comes in.
But back to “stuff.” There are never garage sales, and I have seen only one second hand store, and that was the full of almost useless things with the highest prices on ratty furniture that I have ever seen. There are church and charity boxes around town for used clothes, but they are filled to overflowing and you can always see clothes and shoes all over the ground next to them. I have written before about the lack of quality consumer goods, so people just keep buying cheap utensils and daily implements, and when things break, they are thrown out and new ones bought. The huge waste carts at every corner are always full to overflowing (to the delight of the local wind dogs and cats).
At first I thought it was a pride thing, the unwillingness to use second hand items, or even an ostentatious showing off of wealth. But then I realized that it is taken for granted as entirely normal here for folks to do this sort of thing and be rid of what is not used in a final way. Maybe it is not always that way and maybe people were more frugal with things in the olden days. I know Paolo saves every wire, screw, and piece of rope he has ever come across! People tell me that houses of older people, especially, get filled with stuff that is saved for when they may need it, a carry over of the old days of scarcity.
Danilo Dolci, the northern Italian who came to Sicily to try to better people’s lives here, wrote extensively about the waste of crops that cannot possibly all be eaten and water that is not saved for times of scarcity. He was talking about times in the 1950’s and 1960’s before dams were built and trade routes for fresh vegetables were established. Yet we still see fields of melons that are left to rot because they are not worth picking and fresh water from rains running everywhere that is not contained for irrigation in the dry seasons that come every year. Dolci believed this habit of waste was part of the history of the people, the mindset of peasants who could not count on the future with any certainty, so looked on life with a despair borne out of their own tragic lives. There could not be any trust of other men because trust was always risky, and so why trust anything but day to day life?
Maybe that is stretching the point a bit. The frugality of reusing items is not shared by all Americans either. But a good old Garage Sale or two would sure help my storage situation!
I thought about this the other day when I pondered what to do with some of the stuff we have accumulated here. I know value is in the eyes of the beholder, and some of this stuff looks pretty useful. Every time I would ask people here what they do with things they do not want anymore, they answer that if they can’t give it away, they just throw things out. So when we moved in almost three years ago we asked around and found willing homes for duplicate kitchen items and bed pillows, some love seats, and a bed and we know they are all used all of the time. We have even been known to take a perfectly good beach umbrella off of the junk heap once! But this is several years later and there are still things we do not use just sitting in storage places around the apartment.
We are also used to the giving and taking that comes with food stuff. We are constantly given fruits and vegetable from people’s gardens, and then often pass that on to others when it gets to be too much for us to handle. This weekend we passed on white grapes to Giusi and Franco after deciding we did not have enough to stomp for wine, but almost! This bounty of grapes came along with melons and a small pumpkin from Toto and Ana we have a small family farm and always have too much when the crop comes in.
But back to “stuff.” There are never garage sales, and I have seen only one second hand store, and that was the full of almost useless things with the highest prices on ratty furniture that I have ever seen. There are church and charity boxes around town for used clothes, but they are filled to overflowing and you can always see clothes and shoes all over the ground next to them. I have written before about the lack of quality consumer goods, so people just keep buying cheap utensils and daily implements, and when things break, they are thrown out and new ones bought. The huge waste carts at every corner are always full to overflowing (to the delight of the local wind dogs and cats).
At first I thought it was a pride thing, the unwillingness to use second hand items, or even an ostentatious showing off of wealth. But then I realized that it is taken for granted as entirely normal here for folks to do this sort of thing and be rid of what is not used in a final way. Maybe it is not always that way and maybe people were more frugal with things in the olden days. I know Paolo saves every wire, screw, and piece of rope he has ever come across! People tell me that houses of older people, especially, get filled with stuff that is saved for when they may need it, a carry over of the old days of scarcity.
Danilo Dolci, the northern Italian who came to Sicily to try to better people’s lives here, wrote extensively about the waste of crops that cannot possibly all be eaten and water that is not saved for times of scarcity. He was talking about times in the 1950’s and 1960’s before dams were built and trade routes for fresh vegetables were established. Yet we still see fields of melons that are left to rot because they are not worth picking and fresh water from rains running everywhere that is not contained for irrigation in the dry seasons that come every year. Dolci believed this habit of waste was part of the history of the people, the mindset of peasants who could not count on the future with any certainty, so looked on life with a despair borne out of their own tragic lives. There could not be any trust of other men because trust was always risky, and so why trust anything but day to day life?
Maybe that is stretching the point a bit. The frugality of reusing items is not shared by all Americans either. But a good old Garage Sale or two would sure help my storage situation!
posted by Sicilian Mama at 2:50 PM
1 Comments:
It's the same over here on the other side of Etna--dumpsters overflowing as well as recycling bins. But, I observed the "throw-away mentality" to be worse in the States, at least in Atlanta, where I spent the summer!
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