Every summer of my childhood we would make a pitcher of Kool-Aid, pour it into a metal glass and feel true contentment. My favorite flavor was root beer, my brother’s cherry, one sister’s grape, the other one’s orange. But we would drink whatever was there. Of course it was artificial everything except for the sugar. We couldn’t have cared less. It was easy, it was cheap, and we could make it for ourselves. It fueled bike rides, swimming, and long walks to friends’ houses. Sitting around bored was an open invitation to do chores. So we took our drinks outside.

The cups were similar to the photo on the right, though ours were pretty scratched up on the outside. Just seeing the image brings back the exact sensation of the cold glass in my hand, the slightly curved edge on my lip, and the clank of teeth on metal. They were pretty indestructible, unlike our usual glass ones, so they could survive being left in the yard, dropped from a tree or thrown. Who would throw an empty Kool-Aid cup? Don’t ask.

We never had soda pop. Ginger Ale was only for stomach bugs. Cola, soda and quinine were for adult drinks. We didn’t care. We had Kool-Aid and the colorful mustaches it left every time.

My mother always had a basket of clothes next to her chair waiting to be mended, hems let down, hems taken up, and buttons added. Each of us had hand-me-downs, either from our cousins or from each other. Most needed to adjusted a little for the second or third wearer. Clothes were expensive, but they lasted a long time through sequences of kids. I don’t remember anything unusual about the practice.

What struck me in the photo above was the depth of the hem at the dress bottom. Here was a hem ready to be “let out” to allow a child to grow. If the hem had been in place a long time, sometimes a white line showed that it had been lengthened. I am convinced that rick rack was invented just to camouflage that line!

Sometimes clothing had room to grow features. Snowsuits had sleeves that could be lengthened by snipping some threads, for instance. Sometimes my mother bought my brother jeans he could grow into. Many photos of him show the pants legs rolled up in anticipation.

I thought about this when reading about the mountains of used clothing piling in a Chilean desert. Somehow clothing has became disposable instead of reusable.

There was never a time in my life that I didn’t bite my fingernails. As a nervous habit it worked pretty well, at least for my nerves if not my fingers. I accommodated for this nail deficit and never really missed the usefulness they provided. At one point in fifth grade I decided to stop the habit and bought Thum, a nasty tasting brush-on treatment said to use aversion therapy to stop the habit. It didn’t.

But one day my ten year old granddaughter looked at me quite intently and said I should quit biting my nails because it was unhygienic. In all my nail biting years I had never even considered that. (Denial is a powerful thing!) She was right and I told her I would stop. And I did.

It took many months for my nails to heal. Even after eight years, two of the nail beds are damaged a little. Still they did grow back. Inspired by my daughter I began to get manicures from a local Vietnamese salon. When my nails grow too long to type easily, I sit down with Julie(a truly Americanized name)for a trim and gel polish called Bubble Bath. Above is a photo of the results.

While it turns out fingernails are quite useful for things like prying lids, I still have to find alternative methods. It turns out those same tasks destroy the lovely newly regrown gel covered tips!