Use Again

 

Recently I bought some dumplings for lunch and the bottom part of the container was a nice oval plastic dish.  I always hate to discard things like that - I start wondering if I could make use of it somehow, perhaps as a serving dish for snacks or candy.  That line of thought of course took me back to my days as a student when I had my first apartment.  It was furnished with hand me downs from my family and friends, including an easy chair and shelves that a friend had rescued from someone's garbage.  

I think I was just as happy, or happier, with all those things than with anything "better" and "brand new" that I have had since.

Even before my formal self-identification as a minimalist I liked "making do" and "repurposing".  Not wasting or spending unnecessarily was something I learned growing up.  My mother's "good" dishes were actually a set that she had collected piece by piece as a gas station giveaway.  That was something that was still happening in the 1960's - my first set of dishes in my apartment were another gas station giveaway. 

I remember jam and peanut butter coming in drinking glasses.  Or people just used jam jars as glasses.  I remember towels and face cloths coming as giveaways in boxes of laundry soap.

I think nowadays with IKEA and Dollarama and such stores it's easy and inexpensive just to go and buy what you need.  No point looking for discards from family.  No need to reuse and repurpose.

In my days of major downsizing twenty-five years ago it was the more expensive and "good" things that I usually chose to remove.  It was the basic, functional things that I tended to keep, many of them from my days in that first apartment.