Condensed soup is Ebola.

[vorlon13]

Yeah, I grew up on the stuff.  Yuck now, but I didn't complain as a kid.  What did I know?  Non-officer military kid with six siblings, penny pinching was necessary.

Didn't think about it much at the time, but when I was a kid there was a big garden on the farm, and we put up tomatoes and green beans and pickles.  Quite a bit of the incentive for that was saving money.  And butchering our own cattle too.

Hand me down clothes amongst all the cousins occurred too.  I had to hurry with my bath, and not let the water out, if I wasn't too grubby, next oldest kid got to sit in it.  I remember getting yelled at for wearing out the soles of my shoes before I outgrew them as it they couldn't go in the hand me down pile.

We had quite a bit of expensive water problems.  The well needed fixed several times, water heater problems, the pressure tank. I remember frequent trips to Sears to get parts to get the water working.  Then as now, I'm sure the plumbing problems were expensive.

We didn't have hail insurance or health insurance either, had to save money to get through problems like that.  If the farm operation needed money for something, that was top priority, if we kids were seen as wasting money, or running up expenses needlessly, we got yelled at.  I recall dad and grandpa repeatedly protesting a county drainage assessment as the ditch it was on didn't drain any water from our land, it put water on it.  Money was money, if the county was costing the farm op we were damned if we were going to pay for the privilege.

I recall sitting in the court house for hours while wrangling went on over a tube we wanted in another ditch so we could have better access to a field, and the answer was no, and it was something we had to pay for.

And yes, we ate condensed soup frequently.  I still love Campbells Cream of Mushroom to this day, and it's hard not to have a bowl without remembering how often I had it as a kid.  I recall it being on sale for 10 cans for a buck and we'd stock up on it.

And that was back in the day of individually stamp priced groceries (no UPCs), which meant you had to pay attention when you were rang up to make sure the checker noticed all 10 cans and gave you the sale price.