Fun with mother.

My mom, gotta love her. She has become more frugal in her golden years. With her fixed income she is very money conscious. She hunts down coupons like a fox after a small rodent. She buys every newspaper offered in this area just to get her hands on the bundle of advertisements inside for the coupons. She will even ask her neighbors if they want theirs. She is in 7th heaven when she spreads out her treasure maps on the table. She has a ‘must use’ pile, a ‘might use’ pile, a ‘who knows’ pile, and her ‘still to expensive to use’ pile. She will sit there, glasses halfway up her nose, and concentrate on every single coupon. Sometimes she looks at the front and back over and over, reading every sentence to make sure she has the correct date and how many you can get, just right. She then makes little piles…her now and later stacks.
When I pick up mother to take her to the store, she will hand me her ‘must have right now’ pile of coupons, making sure I have a tight grip on them so they don’t fall out of my hand. I then pack up my mother and her precious papers into the Jeep to have an adventure at 50 different stores because they all have their own special sales going on and you can only use their coupon! Mother gleefully goes on the hunt for her deal of day. She walks up and down every isle stalking her prey. Most times when we go to check out, the clerk who has waited on mother and her coupons before, will slip away and wave over the new kid to help mom go through 200 coupons for only 20 items. That’s when I advise the new clerk to shut down the lane and pull up a chair, and introduce them to mom so they’re on a first name basis. That’s when I do my shopping! I can get a week’s worth of groceries, go back to mother and the ‘I’m now quiting my job’ clerk, to find its perfect timing…we both got done at the same time!

I get mother back into the Jeep with her bags of sale items, a smaller pile of coupons, and I thank the good Lord above that we made it! We only have 10 more places to go to hunt down those daily specials with coupons!