My parents own a dry cleaners in Pearland, TX. My Dad still runs the place. Growing up it seemed as if everybody was just like me. I didn’t know we were cash poor or frugal. What we did was just the way you did things.
When my mother went shopping she always bought matching shoes, belt and purse. She may not have owned five outfits, but she had one good one that matched.
Do you remember when box purses were popular? They came with a latch and a handle and were lined with velvet. We couldn’t afford to buy one – that realization came to me when I was much older. My mother bought a box without the artwork. Mom spent hours and hours designing a purse for me, deciding what to put on the box.
“Do you want this or that on this purse?” she’d ask me. Mom made a big deal out of designing the purse. “It will mean so much more to make it together,” she told me.
I must have been in the fifth grade when she made the purse. I just loved it, but I hardly carried it because I didn’t want to lose it.
On a vacation trip, we stopped at a restaurant. Well, we got ready to leave and we drove about two hours before I realized I’d left my box purse behind. My Dad turned around and drove back the whole way to get that purse and this is a man who never turned around for anything. |
