Essay: March 5

3/5/00

String Too Short To Be Saved
by Elizabeth Hunter

The poet Donald Hall wrote a book called String Too Short To Be Saved. For some of us, string too short to be saved is very short string indeed. A friend of mine, of my approximate age, calls those of us with that affliction CODEPS, an acronym for Children of Depression Era Parents. We are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Throwaway Society. For a CODEP, trashing anything that could ever be put to any imaginable use is gut-wrenching.

Being a CODEP does not, unfortunately, cause one to consider every purchase carefully. It’s taken us a long, long time to learn that a bargain is not necessarily a bargain. A bigger bargain is refraining from buying things for which you have no immediate need but which are on sale. The consequence of our particular pathology is that our houses tend to be not only cluttered, which makes cleaning them difficult, but oppressively cluttered, with items that elicit all kinds of guilt.

Let’s take, for instance, the CODEP’s problem with worn out sheets. As anyone who has persisted in using sheets until they wear out knows, what wears out is the center, the part that has come in regular contact with sleeping bodies. The parts of a sheet that have been tucked into the foot or sides of the bed remain in remarkably good shape. The CODEP looks at such a sheet and thinks, “I need to put this sheet to use, not just throw it away.” She tears the center parts of the old sheet into strips to tie up her tomatoes. By the time she has finished that, she has enough strips to tie up the tomatoes for the next decade, strips that of course must be stored somewhere. And not just somewhere. Somewhere where she will remember she has them when it comes time to tie up the tomatoes six months from now. Where would that be? Chances are if she transports them to her potting shed, when she needs them she will discover that the mice have made a nest in them and all that tearing will have been for naught.

Once the tomato strips have been made, the CODEP has the rest of the sheet to deal with. Being a CODEP, she is also a quilter, so the remainder of the sheet goes into the black hole in which she stores her fabrics: the (multiple) large plastic storage containers so easily obtainable at Walmart and elsewhere. And when, the following winter, she decides to make a quilt from material in her fabric stash, when it comes time to back the quilt with something, her eye naturally turns to the old sheet leftovers. The backside of the quilt will not be seen. What better place to use up all the rest of the sheeting?

Any other place would be better, I am here to tell you, if you must do any hand stitching through the backing. Cast your mind, if you will, over the sheet advertisements you have read. You remember how they stress the number of threads-per-inch there are in a good sheet? Isn’t it 400 threads per inch? Think about 400 threads per inch! Sounds pretty crowded, right? Yes, it is. Four hundred threads per inch is approaching the outer limit of thread density in the same way that the temperature of liquid nitrogen approaches absolute zero. Just as you would avoid cooling your overheated body with a quick dip in liquid nitrogen, so you should avoid attempting to force your needle through 400-threads-per-inch fabric. You could probably stitch through sandstone as easily as your can through an old bedsheet.

Your true CODEP is certain to have an old thimble or two in her sewing box, handed down from her granny, though she has never used a thimble, or used one only when said granny was teaching her to sew a half century ago. After an inch or so of hand-stitching the bedsheet backed quilt, she digs it out and discovers that it doesn’t fit very well on any of her already sore fingers. And which finger, exactly, should she put it on? Surely the one that has been jackhammering the needle into the sheeting. But what about the thumb and forefinger with which she is attempting to pull the needle the rest of the way through? They’re as deeply furrowed with the imprint of the side of the needle as the novice guitar-player’s fingertips are with the imprint of strings. And there’s an awful lot of hand-sewing left to do.

Forget it. Yank out your CODEP roots. Remove the sheeting from the back of the quilt. Wad it up, take it out to the 55-gallon burn drum in the back yard, sprinkle it with kerosene and ignite it! Don’t have one of those drums in the yard anymore? As a CODEP, you must remember them, even if you’ve never actually had one yourself. Neither have I, which is why I still have old sheeting in my fabric stash.

If only old sheets were the only CODEP hurdle. They aren’t. Day before yesterday my trusty handyman Buck was here, fixing some things that have long needed repairing. Since Buck has a pickup truck and has to go by the recycling center on the way home, I asked him if he minded throwing a shattered plastic water barrel into his pickup and dropping it off for me. He didn’t. But before he put it in his truck, he took another look at it.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take this home and cut around the bottom here, and make you a nice vessel, about this high?” He traced a line with the toe of his boot just above the shatter. I looked, and tried to think what possible use I would have for such an item.

“No!” I said. “I do NOT want another thing around this place that I might possibly be able to use, but probably won’t use, before I’m dead and buried.”

“Fine!” he said. “Just askin’!”

When Buck showed up yesterday we had to discuss a couple of the projects he was working on for me. “You know,” he said, “I took that barrel home and cut it off like I suggested to you. And guess what? I found marked right on it that it’s #2 plastic. That means I can recycle the rest of it.”

“Great!” I said. We’d been bemoaning the fact that a lot of plastic isn’t recyclable. “But what are you going to do with that plastic pot you made?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

Poor Buck. He’s too young to be a CODEP. But he’s a guy who can fix anything, even stuff that ought to go straight to recycling. He’s not finished at my house yet; he’s got a garden; spring’s around the corner. I’m thinking he might be able to use the rest of the old sheeting in my fabric stash for his tomatoes. If not, he’ll think of something to do with it. If he can’t, his wife can just shoot him and bury him in it. And mark his grave with flowers she plants in the plastic pot.