February's NaBloPoMo - Make!

This month's theme is "make" -- whatever that means.

What's interesting is that there is so little that America manufactures anymore and most people have a tendency to not make things, but purchase them as needed and discard them with abandon. Once upon a time -- as recently as the turn of the century -- everyone made their own clothes.  They also grew much of their own food. When my mother was a kid growing up in the rural South, you weren't allowed in stores to buy clothes off the rack. You had a sewing machine, you learned how to sew what you wanted and mend your hand-me-downs. If you really had to have it, you ordered it in a Sears and Roebuck catalog. You got resourceful. You made what you wanted.

This was the Southern way, the way I was raised. To be able to make things with your hands, whether it was the curtains in the living room or the pretty dress you saw in the window.  To cook, to bake. To keep a garden seasonally, grow a fruit tree and eat what you grow.  I have all of that in me and have embraced some part of that somewhere along the way in my life -- but I live in a city that doesn't necessarily give me free rein to live that way.

Of course, this got me to thinking about what I make and as it turns out, it's a lot. I would like to add clothes to that list.  I was taught to sew as a child and I'd love to pick it back up.  Knitting, too.

It's kind of wacky that we need a website to scour the nation to find American manufacturers and then have them plead with us to buy American in this really jingoistic way -- like you're less of an American if you don't -- but here it is.  They should have that conversation with the American manufacturers that take their business to other countries.

And then there's The Buy Black Movement. But that's another conversation...