Day 21: Serendipity with Mrs. Child

I was thinking of a passage in a book about frugality a few days ago, and wondered where I had read it, when my husband handed me a late birthday present The American Frugal Housewife by Mrs. Child, a reprint of the 1833 addition.  I flipped it open and my eyes fell on the exact passage I had remembered.   Such serendipity is worthy of including a passage here. 

"I once visited a family where the most exact economy was observed; yet nothing was mean or uncomfortable.  It is the character of true economy to be as comfortable and genteel with a little, as others can be with much.  It this family, when the father brought home a package, the older children would, of their own accord put away the paper and twine neatly...The other day, I heard a mechanic say, 'I have a wife and two little children; we live in a very small house; but, to save my life, I cannot spend less than twelve hundred a year.' Another replied, 'You are not economical; I spend but eight hundred.'  I thought to myself,--'Neither of you pick up your twine and paper.'  A third one, who was present, was silent; but after they were gone, he said, 'I keep house, and comfortably too, with a wife and children, for six hundred a year; but I suppose they would have thought me mean, if I had told them so.'   I did not think him mean; it merely occurred to me that his wife and children were in the habit of picking up paper and twine."

My thought, what does the paper and twine represent for us today?  We have so much waste.  Mrs. Child begins her book with this sentence: "The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so nothing be lost."  I have many fragments left to gather.  I would like to think I am like the eight hundred a year gentleman, but I would like to be like the six hundred a year gentleman.  My true goal is to be "as comfortable and genteel with a little, as others can be with much".