abifae said:
savingdogs said:
All of our gadgets and convenience items have not necessarily made us any wiser, that is for sure. But I don't think I'd want to give up my high efficiency washer and my indoor plumbing, or go back to the days of horse and buggy.
Exactly!!! I love technology. It's wonderful how much stuff we have access to. I just don't see why we cannot do it hand in hand with being healthy, having gardens, living more off the land. People really seem to view it either-or and I don't think it is a binary computation.
Ditto!!!
My granny was awesome. She & pawpaw met when she was 16 and he was 25. He was working for the railroad at the time and was not home for very long before he was back off again. A friend introduced them during one of his visits and he later wrote that friend asking about her. That letter now hangs with their first photo together on her wall.
Just before her 17th birthday, she hitchiked to Florida to get hitched up with him. When he got sick & couldn't work, she got her nursing license & went to work at the local hospital, eventually becoming head nurse or something like that. She was in charge of that floor of nurses. She retired not too long after I came along, so all I really, really remember of that time is riding in the HUGE boat of a car my pawpaw drove to pick her up. I got to sit up front, right in the middle. That always made me happy.
I learned to water bath jellies from my granny. She wouldn't can any meats because those noisy things (pressure canners) scared her, but she water bathed a lot of veggies. Her meats, she just stuck in the freezer. I have all of her canning jars now, and her foley food mill. She taught me how to make cornbread, how to take care of cast iron, how to wash a mess of turnip greens completely free of sand & bugs and how to braid hair. I got all teary eyed when I taught my daughter how to braid, remembering. It was one of those trips home from the hospital, and I had brought a doll with silky hair with me.
She giggled when I told her I had goats and now she uses her walker to get out on the porch & watch them when I take them out to graze. They like the weeds growing around my parents' house and she lives between me & the folks. Just about every time I go to see her, she tells me about the billy goat who would haul her & sister around in their wagon. "We'd just tug on his tail whenever he'd stop and ZOOM off he'd go again. We couldn't steer tho..."
She still talks about the easter chickens she had when she & pawpaw were setting up house. "There was one pink un, course it was a really light brown, but I called it pink. Looked pink to me. Then there was a blue un and a speckled brown un and two green uns. Those greens were my favorites." So now I save my green EE eggs for her.
Her mind is going now, she repeats herself and sometimes gets lost, but when she's there, she's just a hoot. Sometimes I can bring her back by starting one of her stories and telling it wrong. Gets her back up. "Naw, naw, naw, that ain't right. It was like this!"
Thanks for the trip down memory road...
