"#2, what are you doing?" I asked last night. As soon as I asked, I knew what he was doing. I told him, "I know what you're doing. The very same thing I was doing when I was a kid!" That made him smile in relief. My parents brought down to me my great-grandmother's sewing machine. It is an old, wooden, pedal-powered one. I used to go in Great-grandma's room and see how fast I could make the pedal go. It has to be done in a steady rhythm or it gets stuck. It was always interesting to me as a child. So the two of us looked at the machine and pulled out the drawers to inspect their contents. It was a trip down memory lane for me. There were scraps of material that I remember doll's dresses being made of, Great-grandma's snuff can that she always kept in her apron pocket, my grandmother's signature on some papers, and stockings that had had the runners sewn. In those drawers were sraps of fabric so small it would be hard to think why they were saved. Pieces of an old linen lady's t-shirt, underwear with the crotch cut out, tops of socks, pieces of elastic stripped from some waistband...I am sure to some it would seem like trash, but to Great-grandma, they were very useful. She came from a life that would use every scrap it had. This made me start thinking about people's habits; people in my life. My maternal Papaw wanted his cupboards filled with food; he had gone hungry a lot as a child. My Grandma read anything she could get her hands on; she wasn't allowed to finish school because her family couldn't afford it. My mother and her sisters are clothes horses; they had sparing wardrobes when they were children; dresses made from flour sacks. And now there are my children. They want to spend $60 on an electronic puppy, that will surely break in less than a week. They don't understand the value of money, and have very little opportunity to discover it. We do our best, but it is hard in this time in America.