The Grasshopper and the Ant

With all of the reports and headlines in the news these days I begin to wonder how we are going to survive. Life is getting more and more complicated all the time.

I have realized something this morning. I have become more and more like my parents and grandparents in the fact that I go around turning off lights ALL the time. And I have energy saving light bulbs, unlike the time when I was a child and there was no such thing as energy efficient lighting.

I am burning wood in my wood stove to help reduce my heating costs. I am gardening, canning, starting beekeeping, and shutting down all excess spending in my house. These are cost saving events that my parents and grandparents did.

After I was married about 23 years ago, we bought a house near my grandparents. Grandma and Grandpa lived through the Depression and World War II. Grandma told me stories of how she made it through the Depression.

One funny story from Grandma was that during the Depression there were no stockings for women. Grandma said that her and her girlfriend use to paint lines down the backs of their legs. Then when they went to town everyone thought they had stockings on. That is until one day when it rained and their stocking lines washed away.

Grandma Perkins had a saying she always told us. It is also found in President Faust’s talk from April Conference from 1986 “The Responsibility for Welfare Rests with Me and My Family,” (I think it is partly a Depression Era saying)

“Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

I have heard this saying so many times from so many people but mostly from Grandma. We have tried for many years to be frugal with our household. Sometimes we slip, but then we have to pull everything back in and follow the advice of our elders and get frugal again. For us this is one of those times right now. We are pulling in our outgoing expenses and trying to save money everywhere.

So now you ask what I should do to prepare. Well be like the ant in the Aesop fable of “The ant and the grasshopper”. It is a fable attributed to Aesop, providing a moral lesson about hard work and preparation.

The story concerns a grasshopper, which spends his time warming himself and playing during the warm summer months of the year. Meanwhile the ant is hard at work. When the winter months come the grasshopper upon finding himself dying of hunger and lack of warmth tries to get the ant to provide for him. The ant rebukes him for his idleness throughout the summer. This story teaches us about the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence.

When I taught in the past about food storage and being prepared, I would often quote a poem. The author is unknown to me.



Mr. Meant-To

Mr. Meant-To has a comrade,
And his name is Didn’t-Do;
Have you ever chanced to meet them?
Did they ever call on you?

These two fellows live together
In the house of Never-Win,
And I’m told that it is haunted
By the ghost of Might-Have-Been.


Everyday let’s not be like the grasshopper, and be more like the ant. Let’s put our houses in order as we have been commanded to do so by the General Authorities for years and in the scriptures (see D&C 88; 93; and 132). Then we won’t be in the meant-to crowd, and be haunted by the ghost of might-have-been.