Spaghetti Diaries entry #3

Help! I am becoming my mother. Tonight while searching the pantry for some pasta to cook for dinner I came across three opened packets of spaghetti and four unopened packets,three opened packets of now stale biscuits and some weevil infested rice.

My mother does this. Not me. She keeps everything. Not because she wants to but because she doesn't know she owns it. She hates grocery shopping so she just buys a carload full of stuff that she doesn't need in the hopes she won't have to go again for some time. She never checks the cupboard before leaving to see what she already has but just buys it all again then she loads all the new purchases on top of the existing things. I cleaned out her pantry in 1999 and found several jars of dried herbs with a useby date sometime in 1978. She had moved five times between 1978 and 1999. I was about to throw them out when she dived at me from across the room and yelled "Nooooo, they're still good". This is how much she hated the thought of having to shop to replace it. I often clean out her refrigerator because she seems incapable of ever throwing anything away and when I go over there to help myself to chocolate and open that fridge and am hit with an overpowering scent I just have to determine the source and dispose of it. She still stands over me to check what I might be throwing away. If it's not growing mould or is still recognisable she thinks it's fine. She once bought an enormous box of celery because it was only 10c a bunch. I asked her what she was intening on doing with so much celery and she said "who cares, I won' t have to buy it for a while and it was such a bargain". Never mind that the whole lot went rotten before it was eaten. Even the rotten food is reused. She blends it up and feeds it to the garden. She says it's great fertiliser and the worms love it. It looks and smells like some ancient herbal remedy used to bring the dead back to life.

I do love her resourcefulness but we no longer live in a depression. She doesn't have to keep everything and she would save herself a whole pile of money if she just shopped for smaller amounts more often. She won't hear of it though. If I suggest this she just rambles on for hours about how much she hates grocery shopping. I remember when I was a kid shopping with her and she would grumble the whole time. It never seemed such a drama to me. We had fruit and vege delivered by the mobile greengrocer, the milkman delivered the 12 bottles of milk we drank a day and the baker came by daily also. All she really had to do was go into the store occasionally and stock up things would be good. My father used to do it when he was home from his business trips. I gather he sensed her intense dislike of the supermarket also.

I remember her yelling one day about how much milk we drank and she said she was going to stop buying it because we just drank it. We all thought that's what we were supposed to do with it but maybe we were just meant to watch it go off in the fridge.

If ever I have green monsters growing on my food I will immediately seek psychiatric help.