This past Christmas my daughter and I had a chance to sit down with my mom. We listened as she told us about the good old days. We found out that my grandparents got electricity the year that Mom was born (1948) and that electricity was not very reliable. Up until then they had used kerosene lamps on those long winter nights. Now they could flip a switch and have a good shot at having a flickering light.
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| Could get light, shock, or nothing |
Cooking back then was done in a wood cookstove. On cold days the cookstove would help heat the house. On warm days they would cook outside using a formerly indoor stove that had been upgraded. I can't remember if she told me that they had to grind flour early in the morning to make bread. I guess it is possible.
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| File Photo |
And then there is this:
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| Also file photo |
Mom also had an icebox. They would cut blocks of ice from the river and store them in sawdust. These blocks of ice would last until the weather got too warm. Then they would have to buy ice from an ice delivery service. Amazon would not deliver ice, but another river...the Yukon...seemed to have ice almost all year round.
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| You guessed it...a file photo again! |
This also is a file photo:
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| Can be used to file down jagged edges on ice |
My mom told me about how one of the main Christmas presents back then was getting a new set of winter clothes. These were ordered from Eaton's. For a century and a half Eaton's was one of Canada's biggest and most prosperous department store chains. For the residents of rural Canada, the Eaton's catalogue was often the only way to get department store goods. One year my Grandmother ordered new winter clothes for Christmas for her kids and was surprised when Eaton's delivered double the order by accident. She contacted Eaton's but was told to keep the extra clothes since it was a hassle to return them.
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| First Eaton's catalogue, published in 1884. File photo |
And...
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| This file photo might scare you! |
All this is said to remind you to sit down and talk about the good old days with friends and family. It easily surpasses the experience of social media. Pull out an old photo album. Review the family tree. Time is passing by...seems so quickly...and soon enough you will be the person hoping to share a little experience with the younger generations.
Thank you Mister Coco. You are the first person to ever post a photo of an actual file, even if it was just a single file.
ReplyDeleteYesterday I awoke with this very same idea being as my wife and I live here 'in the middle of nowhere' away from all the rest of our immediate family; the threat of contacting and spreading Covid, a further isolating experience, making things terribly worse especially during holiday periods and birthdays.
ReplyDeleteThe wife stays in contact with our children, and grandchildren via Facebook/FaceTime, etc; occasional texts, and emails but, the way I see it, most of it
is small talk with little substantive exchange of information, something I lament because their aging mother's/grandmother's, once-illustrative life is little known among them. I foresee regret on their parts for not asking her about herself NOW; born in 1944, what was her childhood like?; who were her her parents? Her siblings? What did she think of as a young girl. Where did she go to school? What was it like to raise four children all under the age of five? Learn the story of her life as only she can tell it before its too late.
We get caught up in the immediate in the headlong rush of our lives, and don't think to ask the elders about theirs, thinking or not thinking that they'll always be there until they're not; then later by chance or design, learn something about them that was unknown, then painfully realize their woeful failure to ask them when they had the opportunity.