The Feed Room
First published in Prairie Times, July 2008
One of the benefits of married life is that your spouse often times has certain qualities that you lack. In our household one of those qualities that my wife, Ann, is good at that I am not is bargain hunting. For example, the other day I travelled to the store and saw something that was labeled as two for the price of one. After seeing that sign I knew that I have found the deal of the week. At least that is what I thought until I described my successful shopping outing to my wife.
“Did you use a coupon”, she said.
I looked at her with my head cocked in the same manner that a dog does when hearing an unrecognizable sound. “Can you do that when it is on sale?”
“Of course you can. And look here, these three things were not on sale and that other thing that was on sale was not on a good sale and according to the total at the end of the receipt you only saved 39%.”
Dejected, I sat down on the couch and pondered some of the questions this shopping experience raised. What is the difference between a sale and a “good sale?” How in the world are we going to make ends meet after saving only 39% on our grocery bill? What kind of savings does Ann expect? These thoughts spun through my mind so I decided to look through some of our old receipts and see if some of the answers were found in them. It didn’t me take long to recognize the fact that there is no way I can come close to attaining Ann’s high standards for saving. Her receipts regularly show a savings of more than 60%. How does she do this you might ask? Further research shows that she does this by finding things on sale, using as many coupons as possible on those things, and then buying as many of them as you can carry. I suppose that is why we have 18 bars of soap, 32 bottles of shampoo, and 50 or so disposable razors. You might think that Ann has reached the plateau of household savings, but a true master is never satisfied. So she decided to take the next step, which in the case of our family is baking our own bread.
After the sales pitch that Ann recited to me, I recognize that buying our loaves of bread at the store was rapidly sinking this family into the depths of poverty, not to mention malnourishment. So Ann has endeavored to keep our family off the streets and healthy through bread making. I am then informed that bread flour is not cheap. To truly keep our bellies full of nutritious bread (which I am told is positively not found in grocery stores) we must grind our own wheat into flour. Of course, various tools are required to create a nutritious and inexpensive bread making environment. Therefore, we now have a mill to grind our own wheat, a special mixing bowl to mix it, special baking pans, and special oven mitts. I believe the sales lady mentioned that each one of these items is crucial to the livelihood and wellbeing of our family. We also have bags of wheat from which the bread will be made. And wouldn’t you know it, if you buy 10 bags of wheat it costs less per bag than if you buy one bag of wheat. At least that is what I am told. I am not talking about little bags of wheat either. These are 50 pound bags of wheat. They are the same size as the bags that you would purchase from the local feed store to feed to your horses or cows. And we have 10 of these bags sitting in our guest bedroom.
The other day I walked into this bedroom to take something out of the closet and I remarked to myself about the smell. It was not a bad smell but one I recognized from my childhood. It was the smell of grain that I formerly experienced walking into the feed room on my dad’s dairy farm. In honor of the fond memories that the smell has recalled, the guest bedroom has now been dubbed the feed room.
Ann came home the other day with a dozen boxes of cereal. They must have been on a “good sale.” As she attempts to find room for these boxes in our kitchen pantry she remarks, “Where are we going to put all these boxes of cereal?”
I shrug my shoulders and without a second thought pipe up, “How about the feed room?”
She looks at me with that look that seems to convey the message, “How dare you call a part of my house the feed room?” Evidently, the feed room doesn’t provide Ann with the same nostalgic memories as it does for me. Nevertheless we now have a dozen or so boxes of cereal and 10 bags of wheat in our feed room. And I must admit that we have yet to spend a night out on the street.