Grandparents

How many of us can say that they could live like their grandparents? How many of us could do without our cell phones, our computers, or our televisions. Who wants to return to snail mail? Who could or would want to give up using our microwaves, our refrigerators, or our freezers. Anyone want to wash their clothes by hand and hang them to dry in the basement or outside on ropes in inclement weather?

Our grandparents’ wagons, coaches, and horseback riding slowly gave way to traveling in trains, trolleys, trucks, and cars. Flying was unheard of and left for something that only the birds did. Travel then took days or months, not just minutes or hours.

Food was canned, dehydrated, or eaten fresh from the garden. Beans were washed and snapped. Tomatoes were peeled and chopped or made into juice. Cornhusks were shucked, cleaned, and cut from the cob. All the vegetables were then cold packed in quart mason jars, Cheeses and butter was made at home. The churns were arm powered and burdensome. The potatoes were dug and harvested to be stored in the cold cellar with carrots, apples, beets, cabbages, and with the onions that were braided into ropes and hung from the rafters.

The farm was the butcher shop. Almost every rural household had chickens, a cow or a pig in the back yard. Many city dwellers did as well. Their milk and eggs were close at hand. The food scraps would be fed to the animals that would in turn become food for the families. Butchered meats were pickled, canned, smoked, or wrapped and hung to cure. Harvesting and butchering events became times for families to gather and share the labor.

One convenience I am glad has evolved from my grandparents is the indoor toilet. The need to go outside in all types of inclement weather to the privy has lost its quaintness. The second use for the old catalogues has long ago lost its allure. I’m glad that it’s become just a painful memory. May the supply of toilet tissue always be available.

Taking a bath was a once in awhile event with occasional localized ablutions as necessary. Heating the water and facing a frigid room when emerging wet was nothing to induce more frequent bathing. Bath water wasn’t dumped between each family member. The cleanest to the dirtiest made use of the same water, each time the water lost heat and became more tainted.

Oil lamps, gas lighting, or candles illuminated homes. Wood or coal furnaces and fireplaces heated homes.  Insulation was practically nonexistent. Frequent trips to stoke the furnace interrupted sleep otherwise the family woke to a cold house. Anyone lamenting the “good old days?”