Back in the Olden Days!

I like to complain a little when little things go awry.  Don't you? Sometimes it's the small things in life that are the most annoying.

Every day and every week something breaks or is lost or spoils disgustingly in the refrigerator.

This week a branch broke off the giant honey locust tree in our front yard, hanging precariously over our driveway and the electric wires to our house. I cut the hanging pods (edible pods in some parts of the world!) off the branches to lighten the load. The local power company was called and the crisis was solved the next day, with only a brief electrical interruption. A small annoyance to be sure.

My tub drain finally slowed to a complete halt last week. (Maybe this is why plumbers are paid pretty well.) The stuff that came out of that drain when the husband took it apart this week....well, I probably don't have to tell you: the mother of all black hair balls. Blech! (Disgusting, nasty, horrid, gross.) I still need to bleach the heck out of the blech in that tub! I had to wear shower shoes in a tub that is used only by me. Even though we have another tub and even another old basement shower with a great shower massage, this was most annoying to me.

One of my lawn mowers is still held together with duct tape! A few more weeks and we can junk it or decide to have it repaired over the winter. My back hurts when I use it because the taped handle is sagging. Is this not more trouble than I deserve?

Just today an electrical fire a couple of blocks away plunged our whole neighborhood into (indoor) darkness. This doesn't happen very often and I had forgotten how little can be done without power.  How really spoiled we have become. One can take a shower or nap or read--I couldn't think of anything else to do! The garage door was stuck open. The street I needed to take to access the garage sale where I had purchased three lawn chairs earlier for $2 each was blocked totally by a fire truck. I was frustrated. But this occurrence again reminded me how much we depend on our computers and machines and our pretty reliable electrical grid.

The husband was so annoyed (when he came home from golfing) that he wasn't able to watch the golf tournament that he decided to fire up that generator we bought last winter. He got the television going, but forgot that our cable and Internet access is dependent on electric! It was good to know the generator is still functional--just in case! We could have watched a DVD I suppose--but the electric was back on within the hour.

These are just little examples of the small things that all of us experience from time to time. Perhaps worse are the annoyances of people in our lives that we have to deal with. They are less easily fixed--no duct tape or plungers are available for people! And inconsiderate drivers, litterers, etc. etc. ... there really is no avoiding them.

But then, sometimes I like to think back to the "olden days." I think of the stories told to me by my now long ago deceased parents. I still remember many things of childhood. How good were those good ol' days, really?

 I can't identify easily with the difficulties of earlier centuries or even less developed countries today. Sometimes old novels gloss over the grittier details of life. Houses were colder, transportation was limited and food was less available, but things of the bedroom or bathroom (for instance) were rarely described. The smell of the unwashed and un-deodorized--and the horse poop in the street--is unimaginable. (A poop reference has now become standard in every post.)

On Antiques Road Show last week a beautiful old bracelet was shown to open up with a small well for perfume which a lady could access in the event that the bad smells in the street became too overwhelming.

dahlias and toad lilies

The Book Club read The Orphan Master's Son this month, which is a recent fictional prize-winning novel that attempts to be a window into the world of repression and starvation and worse that is North Korea. There was no glossing. But those realities are far removed from my experience and I quickly forget how completely much better my life is.

Freedom, food, flushing toilets and fresh flowers are givens in my life!

But just a generation ago, with the knowledge I have of it first-hand, life was way more difficult.

My mother had to hitch up the horse and buggy to get to a piano (or was it violin?) lesson. That sounds pretty crazy to me--like a bad joke; like the claim that you had to walk to school uphill and barefoot, both ways! Or claims to have lived in a cardboard box. I think that actually happened in The Glass Castle.

My parents were so poor that they sat on peach crates for chairs in their first home. Really!

I remember taking baths in a modest amount of (soft) rain water that was collected in a cistern. It was a little yellow but I can't recall how funky it must have smelled. When I was very young I seem to remember occasionally using the water for more than one person. My father used a makeshift open shower in the basement and he did not always procure the use of a towel when he strolled through the living room to his dressing area!

I also (barely) remember that when I was very young, my farm cousin S had only an outhouse. Am I remembering catalogs for toilet paper? (subtle poop reference)

One quart of home-canned (blech!) meat fed my mother-in law's poor farm family for a week. The only food that was not rationed was the abundance from the summer vegetable garden. Radish sandwiches! I'll bet she would have been happy with the orange in her Christmas stocking.

To cook a chicken for dinner in the mid-century I remember that I had to catch one by the legs, chop off its head, dip it in boiling water and pick off the feathers, burning the small hairs off with a rolled up flaming newspaper. Holding the legs of a chicken while my mother sliced through its head with a sharp butcher knife, and then tossing it quickly on the grass to avoid the blood spatters--and then watching it until it stopped dancing around.......who could ever forget that?

I never went hungry as a child. We had our own eggs, our own meat, our own vegetables. We had apples and pears and even an apricot tree. My mother baked her famous buns and a chocolate cake every other day, it seemed. We ate well--sumptuously well, really. We enjoyed cream for  years. It floated to the top (called top milk--it was more like half & half) of the jars of abundant milk from our hand-milked cow that we kept for awhile after abandoning the larger cow-milking enterprise. (The cow would have to be "freshened" with a new calf every year to keep up that supply, which the new calf shared with us for a time.) And almost every night we enjoyed a small bowl of ice cream. Fenn's ice cream, as I recall, would go on sale for 49 cents for a real 1/2 gallon and my mother would have the basement freezer stocked with a variety of flavors. Does anyone remember butter brickle flavor? (We never churned our own butter or made homemade ice cream, in my experience).

AND my home was fully furnished. Not a single peach crate! Two large sofas (we called them davenports) and two large freezers!

But we did not have the variety of fresh foods that I now enjoy. I eat things every week that I had never heard of as a farm girl in the 50's. Edamame, portabellas, feta cheese, avocado, mango (not really), papaya (not really), Diet Coke Zero (really). Paleo Bread--not! Blech!

I have been purchasing spaghetti squash lately, readily available, although the grocery cashiers have still never heard of it. It is a very good low-carb pasta alternative! Ten minutes in the microwave and voila!


This week I tried the new Land O'Lakes product for easy sauteing--just drop a pre-seasoned bar into the fry pan with the prepared chicken tenders or stir fry veggies. Is that not the height of decadence for the lazy cook?

Even easier, I pick up a savory deli chicken every Thursday night on my way home from work--all hot, spiced right and juicy. I eat it plain or in a Caesar salad with lots of fresh Parmesan. Yum!

There is so much variety in the stores it is hard to decide what to buy. I have the regular stores mastered fairly well but have recently switched from Sam's Club to Costco and all the additional brands and products only add to the overwhelming array of available choices. And how does one manage to remember to incorporate all those super foods when the convenience foods are so tempting?

I have an acquaintance--an older woman living alone (with cats) and a garden of 900 day lilies. She says sometimes a spoon of peanut butter is her dinner. Some still live with surprising simplicity, while I fret over the lack of a decent red wine to pair with my Italian-themed dinner (that spaghetti squash topped with a jar of Ragu and (previously) frozen Italian meatballs and lots of Parm).

(While thinking about this post, I asked one family member what deprivation (he) remembers suffering through earlier in life. Would you believe, dial-up Internet!?)

And getting back to the bathroom--imagine how luxurious it would seem to a couple living a century ago to each have a bathtub to fill with hot water every day.

It is hard to imagine what the next generation will say is horse-and-buggy-ish about these times. It is inevitable that these days will one day be olden. But will they seem golden? They could seem golden in the aftermath of a nuclear blast I suppose, if we were alive to notice...

Thanks for listening to me blather on about my life. I must be talking to my computer, because I'm not sure anyone will get to this point in the post--or get the !point! of this post!

So to conclude, although aches and pains and parts that bulge in all the wrong places become more pervasive as I age, I wouldn't go back to any decade of the olden days. In spite of all the trouble and brokenness, all in all, my life keeps getting better. No more dial-up Internet, after all! And who would go back after HD cable television and smart phones?

I promised to be more thankful this year for the good life I live. And I am. Really!

And I promise to use less exclamation points in my next post!!!

Staying Well - Eat This Bread

I was sucked in by the incessant ads on Facebook.

If I am every going to really "go Paleo," a bread substitute would be a game-changer. I found out recently that Harvest Health carries this (frozen) almond bread made by Julian Bakery in a nearby store. I had to try it! So last weekend I trekked out to the store with Marissa and bought the most expensive loaf of bread ever. I am not willing to admit publicly what I paid for it.

The next day, Sunday morning, I got up early and started sucking down some black coffee. I had agreed to play my trombone in a brass quartet to accompany the choir and hymns at my church and needed to make it to a morning rehearsal.

Figuring I needed some sustenance along with my caffeine fix, I fried two eggs and toasted two slices of my new bread--just to try it. It is very heavy with almond flour and would stick to my ribs and get me through the morning.

I am not a morning person and eating this early was already a stretch for my stomach, but I bravely buttered the paleo bread and prepared to dip it in some egg yolk. But first I sniffed it and then I tried a bite with just butter on it. The bread smelled (was it my imagination?) like it was baked in a cave and tasted a bit worse! I wasn't sure if it was just me, so I offered a taste to the husband. He exclaimed that it tasted like POOP, chewed it a bit and then spit it out into the disposal sink. I was beginning to feel a little nauseous.

Once it was down, I was okay, and I made it through the morning just fine.

But I had some more issues with bread during the worship service. Instead of bits of delicious bakery bread that I remember from previous churches, we now have dreadful gluten-free wafers. I figure that eating those dry awful things is a way of helping me to remember Christ's suffering. Since I was playing, I took a wafer from the elder and set it on my music stand. But I had taken two!

Next, as I turned the page of my music, both wafers fell to the floor. Fortunately, in our church we do not hold to the belief that the wafers turn into the body of Christ, but I was embarrassed that my TWO wafers were now out of reach. After the service, I picked up the wafers and threw them into my trombone case ... and I ate one when I got home. I wasn't sure that was the right thing to do.

So I have one wafer left. Here it is, staged with a pewter communion pitcher--which has its own story.

Anyway, this (Monday) morning I thought I would give the Paleo bread one more try. How can I cover up that taste?

Sunday afternoon I had told my daughter about my very disappointing taste test. When I told my son-in-law about my cave thoughts and the husband's poop exclamation, he suggested it probably tasted like guano.

With the enhanced image of bat doodoo in my head, I got out some cheese and some salami and some spicy brown mustard. With all that spicy yumminess included, I managed a whole sandwich this morning with no thoughts of throwing up. I have to Eat this Bread. It is very nutritious, with almonds and egg whites and vinegar--and I paid a small fortune for it.

I am hoping that I don't need to eat Paleo bread in order to stay well. But I will continue to choke down that sacramental wafer for as long as I live here on earth. (I can't imagine having to eat something that distasteful in heaven.)