I don't think my mother laughed as she explained that it didn't matter which dime was for which product so I ambled back across the street to buy what I was asked to do. We lived in the little town of Bristow in Boyd County Nebraska.

Why I thought today about the incident that happened many, many years ago, I have no idea. Maybe because the price of a loaf of bread and a quart of milk is so much higher. In fact, I don't think we can buy a quart of milk anymore.

It's easy to look back at how inexpensive things were in the past. However, we need to look at how much money we had to buy those products and it's a different story.

I've probably written in the past about my mother budgeting Daddy's $15 weekly check so we could eat and pay other bills, too. If she could budget a dollar a day for food, we ate good. You must remember that we could buy three pounds of ground beef on sale for 39 cents. More often our grocery bill came to about $5 a week.

Thinking about that now, it's hard to imagine that she could feed a family of six on Daddy's small paycheck. (I had three younger brothers.) For what it's worth, I never heard my mother complain about not having enough money.

Although I don't remember how much it cost, about 39 cents a pound I think, my mother bought coffee beans which she ground at the store. Little did she realize that sometime in the future, coffee beans would be the expensive way to buy coffee.

When I was in junior high school, my parents bought a house, which I noticed when I drove down Sycamore Street a few weeks ago, is still there.

Most groceries were still inexpensive, compared to today, when Bill and I were married. I recall buying a pound of Butternut coffee for 59 cents, for instance. My grandmother McCright loved coffee and if your coffee was especially good, she said "it must be Butternut." A couple of years ago, when our eldest daughter was visiting, we went to an antique store where they had one pound Butternut coffee cans for sale for many times the original cost.

When all our kids lived at home, I got in the habit of checking the newspaper grocery ads so we could afford to feed our growing family well and still keep our heads above water. We rarely ate cold cereal, for example. A three-pound box of oatmeal sold for 39 cents. I doubt most of our kids eat oatmeal today but they grew to be very healthy adults and I suspect part of it was due to eating a bowl of oatmeal, with milk, for breakfast almost every morning.

My husband still likes oatmeal for breakfast so I make it several times a week. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to buy the very cheap brand of oatmeal just to see how it compared with what we grew up on. We can't taste any difference.

How does what we bought in the past compare to our weekly grocery shopping today? Well, you know groceries cost a lot more. However, if you check the ads in The Independent you will notice many items you need are on sale. If we can follow a budget and buy items we may not be out of when they are on sale, it helps a lot (and store loyalty cards are a Godsend).

Check the coupon sections in the Sunday paper, too. Believe it or not, 50 cents or more off here and there on items you buy counts up. In fact, I save enough so that every time I shop I can afford to buy Food Bucks to help the Community Food Pantry.