She saved Sunbeam bread bags and Piggly Wiggly’s brown
grocery bags and salvaged the grease from today’s fried
chicken for tomorrow’s cooking of pork chops, the crust settling
to the bottom of the two-pound Maxwell House coffee can,
weighty, like honey in whiskey. She made puddings
from leftover rice and bread and used clabber for her tender
brown biscuits when she came up short of her usual buttermilk.
She straightened bent nails, made art from the patches she sewed
on her boys’ torn dungarees, and painted discarded truck tires
to border black-eyed Susans and wild cosmos in her brush-swept
front yard. After her Friday grocery shopping, you could find her
at the dining table licking S&H green stamps, sticking them
in books she would redeem for a cut-glass bowl or tea pitcher
she wanted for her scant collection of pretty.