In the family I grew up in, not having the resources to do a job was never a reason to quit; it was merely an opportunity for ingenuity. You searched for creative solutions, you got the job done, and then you could take pride in your innovativeness.

One example was my father’s hat solution. One summer vacation, my father spent hours every day digging to make a pond in front of our cabin. (I think he really enjoyed the hard manual labor as a break from his job as pastor of a small-town church.) He would come to lunch exclaiming happily about another hidden spring he had found, or how his holes were already filling up with water.

The problem was the black flies. They were biting him viciously, all over his bald head. We were miles from town, and it never occurred to Dad to go buy a hat.  Instead he made one, folding down the sides of a paper bag and inverting it on his head. The hat worked well, he was proud of his free solution, and he went back to digging, in comfort, bite free.

I had resource problems that summer, as well. I had arrived at our cabin with a grandiose dream of a large and beautiful flower garden, a bunch of passalong plants, my very first rosebush, and no way to water anything. 

Our cabin didn’t have running water, just a hand pump in the kitchen.  I didn’t mind pumping water.  The problem was that the only bucket we had was an old chamberpot with a rusted-out hole in the bottom.

When I complained to my mother, she told me to stuff a rag in the hole of the pot.  “When the rag gets wet,” she said, “it will swell and plug the hole.”  It worked! I pumped water to fill the bucket (12 up and down pumps of the handle filled the bucket once) and I was in business.  I carried water out to that rosebush and all my other plants every day for the two weeks we were at the cabin.

I had other resource problems, as well. The first was that the soil at our cabin was mostly farmed-out sand.  Water went through it like through a sieve. Once we were gone, no one would be there to water my new rosebush, and it would quickly dry out.   The second was that, according to everything I had read, roses were heavy feeders, and fragile plants that had to be protected from destructive insects. The experts said that if I didn’t buy mulch, fertilizer, soil improvements and insecticide, my rose wouldn’t live.

As a fiercely-passionate environmentalist, I immediately ditched the idea of insecticide.  But I had no money for all the other things the books said I needed.

I went back to my Mom, who assured me that this was a sturdy rose (indeed it was, a sturdy old trooper called Seven Sisters) and she thought it would do fine without soil improvements or fertilizer.  As for mulch, yes, mulch was important, especially in such sandy soil.  But we could make a mulch using things we had. She showed me how to take the dried-up sod from the hole I had dug and turn it upside down on top of the rose, to protect the roots from the sun.

I wasn’t sure the rose would live, once we piled into our big sedan and drove downstate.

But when I came back, months later, the rose was not only alive, but thriving.  I eventually propagated 26 roses from that one single plant, to line the fence around our cabin.

It’s good for me to remember those lessons from long ago. It’s still too easy for me to say, when faced with a challenge, “There isn’t enough time”, or “The experts say….”, or “I’m too old…”

I need to remember that if I stop looking for the perfect solution and instead start using what I have, I might find, like my father, a way to keep on in spite of the challenges. I might find, as my mother showed me, that if I focus on what I have instead of what I don’t have, I just might have enough resources at hand to make a dream come true.