The Coffee Can Full of Nails

By Mark Morgan

There was a time in Scott County when nobody thought much about being rich.

Mostly because nobody was.

We didn't have two nickels to rub together to make music, but we had an endless supply of things that would plumb confuse modern folks.

For example, every farm had a coffee can full of nails.

Not new nails, mind you.

They were bent, rusty, and crooked—nails that looked like they'd already served two wars and lost both of them.

That can usually sat on a shelf in the barn, just waiting for the call of duty.

Grandpa never threw a nail away.

If it bent, he'd straighten it with a hammer.

If it rusted, he'd rub it on his overalls, squint at it like a jeweler inspecting a diamond, and if there was even a remote chance that nail could hold two boards together one more time, it went right back into the can.

To me, it looked like junk.

To Grandpa, it looked like an investment portfolio.

That same "use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without" philosophy showed up everywhere else in life.

Take wintertime.

Nowadays, kids have insulated boots designed by engineers, tested by scientists, and probably approved by NASA.

We had galoshes.

Those black rubber contraptions were about as comfortable as wearing two tractor tires on your feet.

And when they leaked—and they always leaked—Mama had a solution:

Bread bags.

Before school, you'd slide your socks into empty plastic bread bags and then force your feet into your galoshes.

It wasn't fashionable, it wasn't comfortable, and it wasn't even particularly effective.

But it worked.

At least until recess, when your feet started making squishing sounds like two ducks fighting over a worm in a mud puddle.

Back then, every kid in town understood that Bunny Bread wasn't just nutrition.

It was footwear.

School wasn't much different.

Every classroom had chalkboards, and every chalkboard had felt erasers.

Those erasers eventually became so choked with chalk dust they couldn't erase a thing.

So the teacher would select two unlucky volunteers and send them outside.

Their mission was simple: beat the living daylights out of those erasers against the brick wall.

Five minutes later, a white cloud would rise over the playground like somebody had detonated a small flour mill.

We'd come back inside looking like ghosts in a blizzard.

Our hair was white, our clothes were white, and our eyebrows were white.

If you smiled, it looked like a row of piano keys floating through a thick fog.

Nobody worried about air quality.

Nobody wore safety goggles.

Nobody filed a lawsuit.

The teacher simply nodded, blew a layer of dust off her desk, and said, "Good enough."

Looking back, it's a minor miracle any of us survived elementary school.

The funny thing is, all three of those memories came from the exact same well of wisdom.

The coffee can full of nails.

The bread bags in the galoshes.

The chalk erasers.

Nothing was wasted.

Everything had a second act.

If something broke, you fixed it.

If it wore out, you found a way to stretch it.

We didn't call it recycling.

We called it common sense.

These days, we live in a throwaway world that replaces things before the price tag even falls off.

Sometimes I wonder if we've accidentally tossed out more than just old nails.

Maybe we've thrown away a little bit of our resourcefulness, too.

And that's what that old coffee can was trying to teach us all along.

We spent our youth looking at what we lacked, never realizing that the greatest tool a person can possess isn't a full wallet, but a resourceful mind.

A rich man who loses his money is instantly poor, but a resourceful man can build a kingdom out of a pile of scrap.

Life, much like those old nails, is going to bend us, rust us, and put us through a few wars.

But you don't throw a life away just because it's got a few dents in it.

You put it on the anvil, straighten it out, and find a way to make it hold together.

Because real wealth isn't measured by what you have.

It's measured by what you can do with what you've already got.

And judging by those old cans of crooked nails, we were a whole lot richer than we knew.