I love living on an old farm, even though I am no farmer. I couldn’t survive the life of my great friend Ed Gulley (we are brothers of different mothers, as he likes to say), who is a real farmer and whose daily workload would strike me down in a day or so.

I have never darned a sock, I hate to think of how many socks I have thrown away. Maria has only bought one pair of socks in he decade or so that we have been together that I know of, and I often think of how wasteful so much of our culture is.

Every day or so, she takes out one of the needles that always seems to be at hand, and darns her socks, they always seem to tear at the heel. I think that sock darning must have been the norm in the kinds of farmhouses where we now live.

For people like me, who has lived in cities much of his life, it is a nearly extinct ritual, even for my friends and relatives who are no wealthy.

Maria has the gift of being frugal without being small or desperate. She can afford to buy socks, but she chooses not to, she doesn’t need to through perfectly good socks away. Karl Marx said that the effect of capitalism is to get people to buy things, only 10 per cent of which they actually need. , and when I think about it, this is very clearly true.

And he didn’t even imagine how capitalism is laying waste to the earth. The sock darning is a daily reminder to me to consider how I live and what I buy and do. It is changing me, and so is my work with the refugees and the Mansion residents, where the need is so great and waste seems so thoughtless and selfish to me.

I am not ready to darn my socks yet, but I’m giving it some thought. There is a lot of wisdom in the way people used to live.