The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer

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A Brief History of Yankee Thrift, Yankee Ingenuity, and Yankee Work Ethic

To make. To make do or do without. To trust your own two hands, maybe too much. To save the bent nails in coffee cans. To fold the ratty towels. To value the threadbaring towels and the labor of squaring them up. To be scrappy. To drive the S‑10 into scrap and keep driving it. To put what you make between you and your end. To know God and know lack and think you’ll put some space between you and both. To fill a kitchen drawer with rinsed-out bread bags. To be handed bags to line your boots. To make do so long it feels like devotion. To be riled by idleness: too much television or sleep, too much time over coffee. To drink day-old coffee from a chip-rimmed cup. To brush with whatever toothpaste’s on sale. To darn with cheap yarn the moth holes in sweaters. The moths come for everything. To feel satisfied when the garden’s in. To fall asleep estimating the harvest. To put up seven quarts of pole beans no one particularly likes. To put up. To hear a person say work and swear he said worth. To do. To do. To abide in spareness and rarely be spared.

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