Everybody laughed. Everyone snickered at the Depression Era Grandaddy with his euphemistic “Archives”:
His jam jars of nails and screws and nuts and bolts and cotter pins and washers and tacks, bits and bobs, spare or often unidentifiable parts, stockpile of lumber and finishes;
The canning cupboards with dried goods, the 10 gallon bins of flour and sugar and rice, the root cellar and deep freezer;
The file stuffed with envelopes of saved seeds, the bins of lime, bone meal, blood meal, fish meal, vermiculite, diatomaceous earth, the compost heap;
The self-sufficientist’s “trade sectored” shops, — paper work, clay, paint, printing, book repair, sewing and textiles, electronic parts and repair;
“The” Shop with a full complement of both wood and metal working hand tools, as well as compact, efficient power tools, hand held and stationary;
The enormous linen press chock full of infinitely reusable napkins and hand towels; the 30 gallon antique Ivory soap drum of cotton rags…
Everybody rolled their eyes, they spent their hours reading Marie Kondo and fantasizing about a non-physical world in which the only thing one needed to thrive was a debit card or Apple Pay.
Grandaddy Depression Man is the one laughing now.
Yinz need something, let me know, it’s bound to be somewhere in the “Archives.” I come from the land of junk pile front yards. I gotchu, silly urbanites.