Mara and I take stock-up trips once or twice a month, usually to Walmart, but sometimes to Aldi's or even Krogers if there is a good sale. This morning, on our bimonthly trip, our cart looked decidedly strange: lots of beans, rice, pasta, pickling salt and drink mixes. Not your typical, day-before-a-holiday shopping cart. We were piling in bags of beans when an older couple stopped and commented that it looked like I was making Soup-mix Jars for holiday presents.
"Um, no", says I. "I think the dollar is going to collapse and I have a habit of enjoying meals everyday."
After a second or two of awkward silence, they started in on how scary things are and what they're doing to prepare for the worst. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was looking into the eyes of 70-year-old closet preppers! She told me how they canned and dried their garden produce, including 170 qts of beans this year and they were planning on growing more green, leafy veggies next year, for a better variety of preserved food. She asked what my plan was for heating and cooking. I told her the good places to find 5 gallon buckets on the cheap. She told me how she and her husband raised 5 kids on a farm, and how they survived WWII rationing.
We ended up enjoying a pleasant 20 minute conversation in the Walmart bean aisle, all because of an off-handed comment. You just never know what will come up when you talk to a stranger. As we were leaving, Mara asked if she was my 'grandmutter', and the old woman answered that she started out a stranger but was leaving a friend. Sigh. There is hope for the world!
3 comments:
I love it! They've seen what rationing looks like, and probably heard stories from their parents about the Depression.
Too few people alive today have any inkling of what shortages are like. Or, they don't bother learning about them. FEMA will bail them out, right?
No thanks!
It is so good to run into other preppers. I find it a breath of fresh air every time I get to talk with an older person, but that must be ten times as great when they are older and a prepper to. I work in nursing and get to talk to so many people from 20-100 years old and every time I get the great info from the older ones 60-100 years old. We have to remember that they have seen it and done it long before us.
http://patriotsagainstthenwo.blogspot.com/
how great was that? reminds me of My neighbors They are preppers They just dont know it but in 84 years They n have seen enough that they are""putting things by" in case of a hard year
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