Signora Sheila

I am a frugal grandmother and proud of it! But we can become too frugal, and then we need a wake-up call. Or in my case, maybe a sleeping pill! Because you see, I had these sheets. Flannel, for our cold and drafty Italian houses that never seem to heat up in the winter! One night in these concrete buildings without them is enough to send even the warmest person running out to buy flannel. Trust me!

New sheets?

But that was the problem. I didn’t need new sheets; I already had them. Two sets in fact, and quite new.

But the top sheet, probably designed by a super skinny tall giant, did not fit the bed. If only they’d put all that extra length on the sides…maybe Hubby and I wouldn’t have had all those bedding wars!

The sheet was so long that I had to tuck half of it under the mattress at the foot of the bed! What a waste, considering it barely covered the sides of the mattress. And let’s not talk about when we were under the covers. It barely only covered us even when we were sleeping right in the middle of the bed!

“Wow!” you might think, “sheets must be very expensive in Italy!”

Otherwise, wouldn’t any sane person go out and buy sheets that fit properly? Actually, I haven’t bought sheets anywhere other other than Italy in years. So I don’t know if they’re more expensive here. And it’s not that we couldn’t afford them. But it bothered me to buy new ones that I didn’t really need.

Perhaps you can learn a lesson from the defective sheets. Before you wash new sheets put them on the bed and make sure they cover you up! Sheets that do not fit should be returned. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with those awful things, maybe for years!

I kept those sheets for 5 years

That’s right, we slept badly for five long years just because I insisted on keeping those stupid sheets!

• Because they should have been perfectly good sheets.
• And why buy new ones when they were still pretty new?
• But mostly because I didn’t want them to end up in a landfill.

Sending those sheets to the landfill was something I didn’t want to do. So I made them work. No, I take that back. Nothing would make those sheets work! We just put up with them.

Until Hubby started complaining about not sleeping well. “I don’t understand,” he said. “New mattress. Good pillows. Lots of blankets. But I still don’t sleep well.” And neither did I.

Then I began to wonder, “Could it be the sheets?”

So on Wednesday, the day of our open-air market, I bought new sheets. And we started sleeping better right away! Which made me angry at whoever designed those defective sheets. But mostly angry at myself for keeping them for so long!

A call to stewardship

And that’s when I got it! Frugality can be overdone. Too bad I didn’t see it five years earlier!

God calls us to be good stewards, and frugality is an important part of that. It means spending wisely and getting your money’s worth.

But frugality doesn’t mean being cheap or stingy. God also wants us to be generous. To share with and care for others. And to provide for our family and loved ones to the best of our ability.

And that can even include making sure they don’t have to sleep on defective sheets.

P.S. The sheets didn’t end up in a landfill. My daughter took them. I think she used them on the kids’ beds. Just call us the thrifty landfill-hating family. And wonder if there is any hope for us!

📷 Image credits: bedding; pig