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!!!