Bread Bags

Bread Bags

A story on a radio program caught my attention. The speaker was saying that, when she was young, she only had one pair of good shoes, which she wore to school. When it rained or snowed her mother tied bread bags over her shoes and ankles to protect them. When she got on the school bus with her feet in bread bags, she was never embarrassed, because all of the other kids had bread bags on their feet too. 

This story brought back memories of my own days in bread bags. My siblings and I often covered our feet with plastic bags when sledding. All the kids did. When my own children were young, I put bread bags over their socks and inside their shoes when they played in the snow. Even when we had boots, we lined them with bread bags for extra protection.

During WWII, the British government published a series of pamphlets titled: Make Do and Mend. These pamphlets gave suggestions on how to reuse or repair everything from socks to clocks during this time of rationing and shortages. At the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, the government updated these pamphlets to help people make it through the recession.

In my day, “making do” was a part of childhood. When we didn’t have it, we’d make it. We loved inventing things. We’d find old boards or tires and turn them into swings or forts. A stick, a string and a safety pin made a great fishing pole – even if you never actually caught any fish. Discarded boxes became sleds, club houses, spaceships, rowboats, go-carts or terrariums for tiny crawling creatures. We once made a whole Barbie village from boxes and played with it for weeks. We used shoe boxes as molds for snow bricks to build amazing snow forts. When the boxes fell apart, we invented uses for the scraps. 

The best part of making do was that everyone else was doing it too. We were more likely to be impressed by someone’s ingenuity than embarrassed by their lack of some material good. Our pockets were filled with bits of string, lost buttons, and broken rubber bands because we just knew that these would come in handy somehow. We taped up old sneakers and called them hiking shoes. We had patches on the knees of our jeans and the elbows of our jackets. Worn school clothes became play clothes. Strollers, bikes, ice skates and musical instruments got passed from kid to kid and from family to family, sometimes making it around the neighborhood and back just in time for the next child who needed them. 

Maybe “making do” is a practice we need to resurrect. Not only did it fire our inventive juices but it also inspired us to share. Instead of grasping for more, we opened our hands to give, because we knew that when we shared with others, the others would share with us. Making do and sharing gave us “extra protection” against the world. We didn’t need to have everything; we had each other. 

These days, when I get ready to take a walk in the snow, before I slide my feet into my old hiking shoes, I add that extra layer of  bread-bag protection. My feet stay dry and my memories stay warm.