Wardy

SUMMER'S GONE!
It's been a really good year.  We had lots of snow in the winter...cold, but not too bad. Beautiful spring...kind of late, but didn't freeze my apples. Frost got them the last two years, but this year the tree was full with plenty to share with friends and lots of deer and birds.  Summer was really nice with a good rain now and then.  And the rain! Wow, how great that has been. Snow came the first time in October, but turned into a beautiful Indian summer.  The colors were spectacular till the snow hit.  It has turned cold earlier than usual.
 The High Priests brought me a couple of loads of wood that I have been using quite regularly.  I love my fireplace.  It is so comforting to watch and such a nice warmth you don't get from a furnace. I think we are in for a long cold winter.  Kind of like it  used to be.  20degrees below was expected and tolerated even without furnaces and electricity.  We used a lot of wood and coal.  Floors were cold and so were sheets.  No carpeted floors, but I usually uses flannel sheet/blankets.  They only cost a dollar and a half or such.  Now they are expensive.  How do you figure that?
     Things sure have changed. I remember how wonderful when the baby slept all night. Getting out of bed on to the cold floor, putting wood or more coal in the kitchen stove to heat the water in the teakettle to warm the bottle while I shivered waiting. It was an everyday chore to sterilize the bottles and nipples and make the formula from canned milk deluted and a little brown Karo syrup and boined water. Now they have throw away bottles!
     Then were the diapers to deal with.  We made them from white flannel material. Two and a half dozen to start with. I had a diaper pail to soak dirties in before washing. It was so wonderful when they invented these little liner paper things to put in the diaper to catch the eeww stuff. They were like the little sheets we use in our dryer machines.... Then came diapers that were long and thinner. The flannel ones were square. You had to fold a little different. Big safety pins were used to pin them on the baby. They even made pins with little duck heads of pink and blue. Even the fashions were different. We always dresses babies in pastel colors till they were a year or so old. Now they even dress tiny babies in black and bright colors.
     Wash day was a whole day job. I had a #2 wash tub I heated water on the coal stove and in the reservoir on the side of the stove. It was wonderful when electricity entered our lives. The gas motor washing machine was dirty and noisy.  It was also a blessing when we got a cistern for water so all you had to do was pump into a bucket and empty it into the rinse tubs. Summer was nice to hang the clothes outside on wire lines. Everything smelled so fresh. But winter was another thing. Sometimes it would take a couple of days to dry and even then the corners where the pins held them on the line would have to finish drying in the house.
     Are we spoiled or what?  We have throw away everything. From doing things from scratch to just opening a box or push a button. From one phone for a whole community to phones that do everything. The idea that you could see the person you are talking to was so far fetched was crazy. My mind is completely boggled by the technology of today that will be old stuff tomorrow. Is it good or bad?  Seems like things have just moved so fast that some of the basic things are being left behind and forgotten.  I liked creating things from nothing into something I could be proud of...now you can just order it on the internet already made to perfection.  Children in my early lifetime had time to be children. They could take time to figure things out for themselves.... to dream  dreams.. Now parents seem driven to see that every minute of a child's life is organized by stuff....sports...dancing...karate.... All these things are important if used appropriately.  They also need down time and work time and time to think about others.  Children need to realize that parents are people too.  They need to know that Mom and Dad need to be themselves sometimes too.  So much of the time today parents lives are so wrapped around the children's needs and wants that they wear themselves out seeing that they have everything they think they want that the kids don't learn to look outside of themselves to see the needs of others. If the kids are pushed so hard that they feel the pressure to perform, everyone has a breaking point...even grownups.  Society puts so much pressure on everybody today that too many feel like just screaming.  That's not being happy,  I pray every day that all my children, grandchildren, great=grandchildren might take time to see where they are on the thermometer of happiness.  I hope they can look at their lives and be able to see where they and their families are  on that gage. Too much pressure is dangerous.