posted on Friday, November 03, 2006 12:20 PM
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Frugality
by Vilma Gregoropolous
My family is known for being able to fix anything. One day my uncle, Lino sent his son, Abe, out to the alley to fetch an old wheelbarrow he wanted to straighten out and use. Abe walked up and down searching for a long time. He saw a pile of rubbish but he didn’t see a wheelbarrow anywhere. He finally went to his father empty-handed. Lino walked him back out to the pile of rubbish, picked up some broken down parts that had in fact been a wheelbarrow in better days, and proceeded to rebuild it. 60 years later it still works better than anything you could buy at Home Depot.
My relatives came from a little town in northern Italy called the “Furnace of Zoldo”, where people knew how to make do with what they had. After they moved to North Stonington Village, Lino and my grandfather, Noah, ran a garage and forge that had clients from as far away as New York City. People knew they could fix anything, make parts from scratch, and, just as important, they didn’t charge much. They were in business to make a living, not make a killing.
Their mindset fit right in with the local Yankees who were just as well known for their frugality as their ingenuity. (I often think my family’s ability to fix anything was in fact, inspired by parsimony, and I’m guessing the same was probably true of the Swamp Yankees here in Connecticut.
North Stonington and many of the towns around it were working-class farm towns. The character of the people who lived here was as important in shaping the town as the character of the land. Nothing was wasted, everything that could be used was put away for a rainy day or a long winter. Land was kept for farming and firewood. People built farmhouses to fit the many generations of working hands that lived in them. They built small cottages by lakes – just enough room to eat and sleep in, because they knew they were going to be fishing and picking blueberries the whole time anyway.
All this has changed. Frugality has become a lost art. People build houses that are five times as big as they need and burn what’s left of their money heating cathedral ceilings that give their homes all the cozy warmth of a hotel lobby. They build airport runways instead of driveways. They clear-cut land to create views they will never see because they are never home: two incomes are generally needed to keep up the payments. And in five years they relocate and build another mansion. Building has become an end in itself – conspicuous consumption designed to flaunt wealth.
The irony is that people move to towns like North Stonington in the first place because they want to live in the country. And thus, the guiding principle of every town plan is to “preserve the rural character”. We are more than willing to support conservation projects and land trusts. But we must also be willing to adopt the character of the people who made Connecticut what it was, realizing again, as the Yankees did, that frugality is a virtue. If the Borderlands region has preserved its character, it is because the people here knew enough not to squander what they had - whether it was a wood lot or a wheelbarrow.