By Al Batt, Tribune columnist

We made do.

That’s what our families did.

As children, we heard, &uot;we’ll see&uot; a lot.

&uot;We’ll see&uot; was nothing more than an expanded version of &uot;no.&uot;

Those words let you know that you probably weren’t going to get what you wanted, while allowing you to remain hopeful.

We grew up during a time when 100 miles was an eternity.

Our world was wall-to-wall, not coast-to-coast. It was when hot chocolate was always called cocoa. When getting a tan wasn’t living life on the edge. When a dessert was a happy ending. This was an era when the world operated on seniority.

It was a time when it was common to see overhead lights with the strings hanging from them with the knot on the end where flies met and fell in love.

It was a time when money wasn’t plentiful.

Piggy banks had to post armed guards.

My wife and I grew up in frugal households.

The homes were frugal by necessity.

We fixed everything on our farm with baling wire and baling twine. We didn’t use duct tape. Had we done so, we would never have had the need to replace anything.

Economy made for the occasional rocky road, but I’ve found that sooner or later, you appreciate the rocks.

Because of this frugal upbringing, we tend to use things until they have no more use in them. We try to squeeze the value out of a dollar. We recycle.

I tell you all of this so you will know why we have never thrown a piece of soap away.

I’m not talking about chucking a bar or a cake away. Does anyone call it a cake anymore? I’m saying that we never throw a small piece, a sliver or a remnant away.

We have soap that never ends. We cannot finish a bar of soap.

We never discard a crumb of soap.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s being a wise consumer. To do otherwise, would be improvident.

There is a process that we follow. When a bar of soap has been worn down to a nubbin, we break out a fresh, new bar.

It’s typically of a brand that doesn’t bring back painful memories for me. I don’t want to associate with a brand of soap that reminds me of a taste that I connect with the utterance of an obscene word during my boyhood years.

The new bar of soap, stripped of its wrapping, finds its place on a shelf in the shower. Meanwhile, the survivors of the previous year’s collection of soaps have huddled together in the same shelf to welcome the new arrival.

These tiny bits of soap make those little bars of hotel soap seem like mountains in comparison.

The small nits are not content to languish in the soap dish.

They become hitchhiking slivers of soap.

This assorted shrapnel gladly attaches itself to the new bar becoming a kind of a tumorous growth on the bottom of the new bar of soap.

They adhere to the fresh soap and grow like stalactites.

This supplementary soap is as useless as chicken poop on a pump handle.

These diminutive bits of soap are too small to handle comfortably and we could easily cast the small pieces away.

But that would be wasteful.

Oh, sometimes I will consider the lumpy bars of soap and entertain the urge to toss some of the soapy shrapnel down the drain. That would allow me to enjoy the smooth, even surface of a new bar the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

I suppose I could make a bar out of the remnants, but nobody would use them.

Our soap situation has become a regular soap opera.

Soap is important to my family in more ways than cleanliness.

I had a cousin who was in the navy. When he was on a ship, he always carried a bar of soap. He figured in the case of a shipwreck, he would wash himself ashore.

As I said, I have tasted soap.

Only chickens were allowed to use fowl language on our farm.

&uot;You watch your language, young man, or I’ll wash your mouth out with soap!&uot;

I heard that and the next thing I knew, I had a mouthful of Lava soap.

The bars of soap that we have in our home, the ones that appear to have sudsy ticks on their

bodies, would not be good for teaching a youth the perils of a profanity-laced vocabulary.

We’ll make do.

&uot;You watch your language, young man, or I’ll wash your mouth out with broccoli!&uot;

(Hartland resident Al Batt writes a column for the Tribune each Wednesday and Sunday.)