Embracing My Generational Quirks

In essence, I’m borderline whatever. Not quite normal or average. Just, um, “different.”

And in that spirit of different-ness, one of the impacts of me growing up in a family of six in a town of eighty people in central Nebraska was how we had to preserve food to make it last. Only once a month did we take a forty-mile drive to Grand Island to shop at Skagway and fill up the trunk of our 1968 white Ford Fairlane 500 with bags of groceries. After we arrived back home in Cotesfield, six loaves of the least-expensive white bread on Skagway’s shelves got tossed into one of three freezers in our basement. Not until I was an adult do I recall eating a sandwich with bread that wasn’t smooshed on at least one corner.

Our noon and evening meals typically included either pork or beef because dad purchased a pig and half a cow each year at the county fair and brought home the processed meat in laundry baskets that got unloaded straight into the freezers.

The arrangement was highly efficient until one of those freezers quit working one summer day and we didn’t realize it until the following week. The smell of rancid meat permeated the house for days. No worries, though. An emergency trip to the appliance department at Sears in Grand Island, and we were back in business.

Since I missed out on so much produce in my youth, nowadays I prefer fresh fruit and veggies. And yes, I keep our pantry and freezer stocked like a neighborhood grocery store because that’s how I was raised. More like it’s the only way I know how to function.

High anxiety? Control freak? Healthy hoarder?  

Whatever the trait is, it appears to have other unintended consequences. Take my beverage selections, for example. One night during dinner on our Alaska cruise in late August, I ordered a pre-dinner cocktail, wine with dinner, decaf coffee with desert, then of course I always have water on hand to stay hydrated.