I love my grandma. She's 86 years old, though she's sure there's no way that's possible. She also thinks my grandpa (who died in 1984) is still alive, and she sometimes has no idea who I am, even though she lived with us for 15+ years as I grew up. Unfortunately, she has Alzheimer's.
(This is Grandma and I this past Easter.)
Alzheimer's is one of those diseases where some days you laugh and some days you cry. Oh, you could cry every day, but what kind of way is that to live? And some things are just plain funny. Like when Grandma recently lost her teeth and offered my aunt some candy, and her teeth were in the candy bowl! The thing about my grandma is that she was always entertaining--just not always when she was trying to be...
Grandma was a saver. Nothing was ever thrown out. Not even food. She would literally pull food out of the trash when my mama threw it away so that she could "rejuvenate" it. That was her word for it. You had to be careful eating anything she made. It's like, once you cook something, it has a limited life after that, right? Before it goes bad and you throw it away, I mean. Well, I guess that she figured if you cook it again, that just resets the clock. For example, she might make a HUGE batch of mashed potatoes on Sunday. On Tuesday, you may have potato cakes. On Thursday, you'd have refried potatoes. Come the following Sunday, you could be eating some soup that has some weird "dumpling" in it that you think might have once resembled a potato. And that was just food. Everything was repurposed in her house.
Some of Grandma's things are now in my house. No, I'm not still cooking the umpteenth generation of her rejuvenated potatoes. But she's in an Alzheimer's facility now and couldn't take all of her things with her, so I was blessed enough to have inherited some of her belongings. I got this awesome (and heavy) cast iron pot.
I also got this gorgeous enamel-over-cast-iron dutch oven. This thing is so pretty I seriously leave it sitting out on my stove all the time, and I love cooking food in it (though our family is quickly outgrowing it).
I also got a sewing box with a bunch of random sewing things in it. One of those things was a sewing tape measure that I guess I've never used before. So I grabbed it the other night to measure ribbons for some of the hair clips I was making. It was wound up so nicely with a twisty-tie holding it so it wouldn't unroll.
Nice and thrifty use of a twisty-tie, right? I mean, what do you usually find twisty-ties on? Garbage bags? Food bags? Then I looked at the twisty-tie and saw this:
Yup. You read that right. From Children. Not By Children, mind you, but From Children. I have to admit that the first thing that popped into my mind was how my parents always called dried apricots "baby ears" when I was growing up. Ok, maybe it's just me, but my mind is weird like that. And don't get me started on the possibilities for any garbage bags that might have come with.
My hubby immediately thought of some foreign sweat shop with children slaving away on whatever product it may have been, so the company could proudly proclaim their labor practices on their handy twisty-ties.
So, what do you think? What on earth do you think was the original product this twisty-tie was on? What craziness pops into your head when you see an old twisty-tie that says "From Children"?
Edited to add: Ok, folks! The mystery has been solved, though it's not nearly as fun and creative as my imagination! Thanks to Nikki for her super-sleuthing skills in finding the following link!
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