One Potato, Two Potato

In my cupboard I have eighteen cans of jalapeno peppers that cost 11 cents each. There were twenty, but I have eaten two in the last year. I bought them because they were 11 cents each, you see. You never know when you might need jalapenos. I bought the twenty cans of mushrooms at the same time for the same price, but those I ate. Most of them, anyway.  

My daughter Blythe calls me a hoarder, which I think is a little harsh. I mean, I don’t have dead animals in my house or stacked up newspapers. You can walk in the door and to each room without tripping over a slide projector or a Godzilla replica. I do have a slide projector, but I needed one, and it is stowed in the trunk of my car where my kids can’t see it and comment on it. I do not own a Godzilla, I am proud to say.

Besides, my daughter Gen said Blythe should not use the word “hoarder” lightly. Hoarding is a mental illness, so throwing that word around must be ableist, like calling something “lame.” She was the one who set me straight on that one. She has a master’s degree in public health, so she let me know that labeling things “lame” was inappropriate. I tried to explain this concept to my students, but they told me I was being lame. I took offense then and told them so because I am, in fact, lame, but I prefer the term “gimpy.” They only rolled their eyes and issued the edict, “That is so gay,” which turned into yet another conversation.

But back to my hoarding. I mean, Stuff Acquisition Syndrome (SAS), not to be confused with Never Enough (NE) a related disorder that often manifests along with SAS. I have both. I think this condition might be congenital, or at least, generational. It definitely goes back to my childhood and maybe beyond. My youngest, Madeleine, used to tell me “It’s the potato famine kicking in” when I would quibble with the waiter about paying an extra 35 cents for substituting salad for fries with my burger. My cheapness was an issue long before the symptoms of NE started showing up in my shopping habits and long before SAS (rhymes with mass) took over my life. 

Looking back on my early years, I realize there were few items from my childhood home that did not come from garage sales. My mother was a firm believer that a coat of paint could remedy most maladies. She had a friend who ran an upholstery shop and sold her excess fabric on the cheap. So the coffee table she bought for five bucks could be painted robin’s egg blue to pick up the colors in the velvet striped sofa and loveseat she had covered for a song. Mama tried.

I have to admit that painting furniture feels pretty good and I have a stockpile of furniture in my garage that I plan to address someday soon. I will drag it to the back yard because growing up, my daughters let me know that my painting furniture on the front lawn was the source of some humiliation for them. I thought that was a little shallow on their part, but then I remembered how I’d feel when friends came over to my hodge-podge house when I was a kid, and, well, point taken.

Anyway, I thought we were poor growing up, and as a teenager, I blamed my dad. Of course, we were somewhat poor when I was little, and I didn’t blame him then. He was a graduate student, and then an assistant professor, and then a research scientist, and then he got a PhD. We were not trashy-poor, but genteel poor, I guess. I think there’s a difference. My dad used to tell us about that one time, early winter, when he trucked down to the pond to catch us a fish for dinner, but all he caught was whooping cough. He had to miss a week of work: an early lesson for me in irony.

My parents made the best of their situation, though, with four kids and not a lot of moolah. I remember one of their pastimes was to buy a bottle of pale dry sherry, the kind my dad referred to as “rotgut,” throw a blanket on the lawn, and watch a summer storm roll in. He was fond of bringing my mom home a single rose, which, I think Dorothy Parker had something to say about.

But later, the potato famine kicked in. My dad lost his job—or quit—I never quite knew—at the university and started a greenhouse business. Well, he already had the greenhouse business to give my mom, a housewife, something to do so she wouldn’t have to leave us kids to our own devices and have us grow up ungodly hooligans. So he shifted over to grubbing for a living, since his PhD was in agriculture. He was, what my youngest brother, the baby, had proudly called, “a dirt doctor.” We kids worked in the greenhouse every day after school for a dollar an hour and all the Shakey’s pizza we could eat come nightfall.

He also took some research jobs. One summer, he went to Russia, I mean the USSR (back then), for the summer. I remember this as the summer of cabbage. We had cabbage soup every day for three long months. I thought this was because we had no money, and later flung this out in an argument with my parents about my dad’s selfishness, traveling abroad while we ate cabbage soup every day like some family out of 1984 (it was, in fact, 1974). My mother set me straight. We did, indeed have money that summer. We also had a lot of cabbage in the garden, and, well, she couldn’t let it go to waste, now could she?

My mom had some issues around food, too. I have to say, the cabbage soup was pretty good, just not every day. My mother was an amazing cook. We used to call her the McGyver of cooking (another 70’s reference. McGyver was a TV character who could bust out of a high security prison with nothing but a paperclip and a piece of yarn). Give my mother a cucumber and some paprika, and—you get the analogy. But anyway. One time I asked my mom how old she was when she learned to cook, and she told me she was five.  “Five?” I asked. “Why did you learn to cook at five?” Her reply: “If I hadn’t learned, I would have starved.”

Which brings up my grandmother, my mom’s mom. Apparently cooking skips a generation because she had two, maybe three dishes she would make depending on the season and her hankerings. Now, she was what they call dirt-poor. I guess I never understood that term until I went back to see her as an adult. It wasn’t just the outhouse or the water she siphoned up from a spring beneath the bluff where her cinderblock house was perched—a house my grandfather built with the kitchen downstairs, so the warmth from the woodburning stove would rise and heat the house to a whopping 120 degrees in July. No, it was the layer of dirt and soot on every surface, the ragged patches of mismatched linoleum scattering the concrete floor, the spit can beside my grandma’s busted-up wicker rocker—where she sat for hours and watched the gray static on a black and white TV listening to Days of Our Lives and her other “stories.”

One time my students in Crosby, Texas, asked me the difference between “poor” and “po.” I told them there was no difference, just a case of mispronunciation, but they disagreed vehemently. “Then you tell me,” I said. One kid set me straight. Apparently, “Poor is when you don’t have any money,” he said, but “Po is when you don’t have any money, and you’re mean, and you’re dirty.” Looking back, maybe my parents were the former, my grandma, the latter. If there is such a difference.

Not only that. My grandmother was a bit of a hoarder. Well, maybe not a hoarder, but a miser. In her later years, according to my mom, Grandma got $230 a month in social security, but she would try to live on $30 a month and save the rest. She ate cornbread and beans every day, and on Sunday, if there was family visiting, she might kill a chicken, always the highlight of a week at Grandma’s, watching that poor bird run around the chopping block headless until my grandma grabbed it by the feet and hung it up to bleed out.

Since her diet was mostly vegetarian, I wondered why my grandma eventually died of poor circulation and heart disease. My mother’s answer: bacon fat. Yes, I almost forgot that can of bacon grease on the counter, a scoop of which would add flavor to every vegetable that came out of my grandmother’s garden.  Compared to my grandmother, my mom lived like a queen. Still, Mom wasn’t one to waste the cabbage. And what she could do with a few yards of fabric from Woolworth’s!

See, my mother also sewed. She would buy yards and yards of the same fabric on sale and make different articles of clothing for me out of it: dresses, jumpers, pleated skirts, culottes, but not pants, because girls couldn’t wear pants to school. On cold days, my mother would make me wear my brother’s pants under my dresses, another source of humiliation. Why she couldn’t splurge on a pair of tights for me was beyond my comprehension. Still, she was really proud of my clothing. I especially remember some gray wool that was incredibly hot and itchy, maybe more so since I sat right next to the blast of the school heater, a dangerous iron contraption that you did not want to brush up against wearing all that wool. “She looks just like an English schoolgirl,” my mom would say proudly. Except, of course, for my brother’s britches under that jumper.

Summers were better, I’ll give her that. Lots of florals, probably echoing the flour sack dresses she wore as a kid, but kind of pretty, really, with matching bloomers until I got too old for such things.

One more story. When I was fourteen, my dad started giving my mom a clothing allowance: $50 a month for four kids. I told him I wanted my $12.50. By then, I could sew, and it seemed only fair that I should get my share to spend on whatever I could manage to make for $12.50. He got so mad. I was too selfish to care that the money was earmarked for which ever one of us kids needed shoes in September or a coat in January. There was no reasoning with me. My poor parents.

One part of my story I will mention, only briefly. Eventually, my parents’ curse—which is every parent’s curse—came to rest on me. You know the one: “Someday you will have a kid just like you.” It happened. I had four daughters, and at least two of them wanted their $12.50. I got pregnant with the oldest back when a single parent was not called “a single parent” but rather an “unwed mother.” I spent a year on Welfare, finishing college. They made an exception to their “If you can go to school, then you can work” rule that was enforced in the eighties, before welfare reform, when it dawned on the powers that be that a lot of women stayed on Welfare (with great health benefits) rather than work a minimum wage job (with no benefits, plus babysitting costs). They made this exception because I begged.

Anyway, my oldest, Genevieve, is my potato famine baby. By the time the others came along, I was teaching, and their nest was feathered a little better. Madeleine, my youngest, though, still seems to have inherited the family poverty mentality and feels guilty asking for anything, especially since she got labeled “spoiled.” All of my kids, except Madeleine, started working at fourteen. They all seem to have adopted a creed of minimalism, mostly because it’s in vogue, I think, but perhaps as a reaction to their old mother’s SAS. Dominique, the second, relapses occasionally and sneaks out to a thrift store, leaving with mountains of sportswear from the 80s and 90s, her particular craving, which she claims she can sell in LA on ETSY or somesuch market. I personally think she donates most of it back. Hers is a binge and purge cycle, which is also symptomatic in some cases of SAS, but mostly she has it under control

So. The potato famine. My grandma. My mom. My dad. Me. My daughters.  Now that they have subscribed, at least nominally, to the cult of minimalism, they point out to me endlessly what I’ve guessed at for some time: I have a problem with acquisitions. Every day, I go to some thrift store or garage sale and acquire something old that is new to me and stash it somewhere in the event that I might need it, if only for Halloween. Or Mardi Gras.  Or my third wedding on a date yet to be determined.  Yes, I realize that it is sad to look for a wedding dress at a thrift store. Even now, instead of writing this essay, I want to go to the Goodwill store because the orange-tagged items are 75% off this Monday and you never know what you might find that you didn’t know you needed.

Recently Blythe convinced me to hire her friend, Mia, to help me de-clutter. Mia is trying to get certified in the Marie Condo method, so she needs to spend a certain number of hours helping some poor miscreant like me.  De-cluttering the Condo way is a four-step process, from what I understand: clothes, paper (including books), kitchen, and “kimono,” which seems to be sentimental stuff like the Mother’s Day presents your kids made for you by gluing glitter on a stick. That step is particularly daunting. Hell, they all are.  But I was so worn down by my daughter’s nagging and so worn out by moving piles of rubble around my apartment, that I agreed.  Mia explained that it was like a meditation, that you have to take everything out of the closet, the drawers, the shelves—look at it, hold it, and ask yourself what purpose it serves and why you are holding on to it. You are supposed to only keep what  is useful and what “sparks joy.” And then there’s an art to putting everything away so that it is accessible, functional, useful. 

So far, we have only addressed my clothes, and we haven’t quite finished.  I have dispensed with 7 garbage bags of clothes, and have learned to properly fold the ones I’ve kept. Except for underwear. I just refuse to spend the time it takes to fold underwear. It’s not like any of it sparks joy.

I told my friend Tina that the more I gave away my clothes the more I realized how little they meant to me. “I just keep getting more hoping to look better, but the problem isn’t the clothes,” I said. “The problem is how I look in them. I just need to lose weight.” Tina said, “No, you just need to like yourself the way you are. As is.”  I can only work on one thing at a time, though, according to Marie Condo, and this week it’s clothes. I’ll tackle self-love after kimono, I suppose.  And then weight loss. At least I’ve already lost 50 pounds—of clothes, that is.

I do feel a bit lighter. Just a little. I keep thinking of the Wordsworth poem, the one with the line that says, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” I am somewhat proud that I spent this morning writing this little reverie instead of buying another red tea kettle or some swim fins and the a gently used snorkel I saw at the Goodwill.  I am sitting on my porch with coffee going cold and my cat yowling to be fed, and pounding out the last lines of this, my first essay, in a long time. I do feel sort of, dare I say it?  Empowered. And a tad cheated, too, I’ll admit. But so far I’ve resisted the urge to drive to Kroger and paw through that bin of discount meat (in lieu of going to Goodwill to see if they have any must-haves on the orange-tag rack). One day at a time, as they say in all those groups I never went to but always needed. Maybe I’ll join one of those groups today. Or two. Or three.

-Kelly Ellis

Kelly Ann Ellis lives, works, and writes in Houston, Texas, where she obtained an MA in English Literature from the University of Houston. She is a member of Poets in the Loop and co-founder of hotpoet, a literary nonprofit and small press which produces arts events, publishes underrepresented writers, and curates a biannual online literary journal, Equinox. Her work has appeared in various publications including Texas Poetry Calendar, Ilya’s Honey, and anthologies from Houston, Austin, and Rio Grande Valley poetry festivals. It has likewise received awards from Bay Area Writers League, Austin Poetry Society, and San Gabriel Writers League. In addition, she had two winning poems in Public Poetry’s Artlines ekphrastic contest of 2012, when her work was showcased and then archived in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Recent publications include a poem in Echoes of the Cordillera, a 2018 collection of poems in response to photography, and cine-poems accepted in the REELpoetry festival in Houston in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Moreover, her work was featured in the poetry, music. and dance production "It’s About Love" in the Houston Fringe Festival in 2019. Last year, her short fiction was presented in the podcast The Short Story Show as the second-place winner of their 2020 contest and re-released in a “best-of” showcase in September, 2021. She was nominated in 2020 for a Pushcart prize for her poem “Reef” published in "Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast" by Lamar University Literary Press, who will also be publishing her upcoming poetry collection "The Hungry Ghost Diner."