Sitting on my

[quercus alba]

Front porch this morning watching a guy rake and bale a hayfield adjoining my yard and it made me think about farming before mechanical balers that had to cut by hand and feed their stock with a pitchfork. In spite of all the stupidity going on around us, we still live in the easiest most prosperous time in history.

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I can remember grandma’s outhouse with a slop jar under the bed for nighttime emergencies. I remember when the fire place and wood burning stove was the only source of heat in the winter. Straining coffee grounds thru a homemade strainer into your cup, drawing water from a well and heated on a stove to bathe from the porcelain dishpan grandpa shaved out of. Listening to the Astro’s on an old am radio at night. Only wealthy folks had air and you had to change channels by hand. Rifle racks in your truck on school property and nobody thought anything about it.

I guess I’m just waxing nostalgic because I just got my official curmudgeon license today and I long for a simpler more innocent time that is gone and can’t be retrieved.

[Thumper]

I remember those times well. I remember my grandmother always warning me to check for snakes when going to the outhouse. One morning I went in to take a dump and got a bit careless about having a good look around first. A few seconds after sitting down, I was "snake-bit" on my ass! I 'bout ripped the outhouse door off the hinges gettin' out'ta there, and tryin' ta' run back up the mountain with my pants still around my ankles while screaming like a little girl, was quite the chore. While grandma checked my ass for fang marks, grandpa headed down to the outhouse armed with the old .410 that always leaned against the wall at the kitchen door. He came back laughing his ass off which I thought odd since I was preparing myself to die a horrible death. Somehow a dang chicken had gotten into the outhouse and I guess was down there lookin' fer bugs or sumpin', then that dirty sob pecked me on my ass when I sat down! I was a bit leery about eating those fresh eggs from the chicken coop for a few days after that.

As for the wood stove, my job every morning was to go out to the woodshed for some wood and kindling (another place I had to watch out for snakes), then get the ol' woodstove fired up before grandma came in to fix breakfast. I remember she'd always put the empty eggshells on a sheet pan in the oven where they'd dry out, then she'd crunch 'em up and mix 'em in with the scratch she'd throw out for the chickens. She said it made their egg shells stronger. (They're basically calcium, so I suppose there's some science behind it) I also had to keep firewood stacked up next to the big ol' stone fireplace. That's where we'd gather in the evenings. I remember popping popcorn in the fireplace with one of those long-handled metal popcorn pans. They had a spring on the mountain above the house, so it flowed into a reservoir my grandpa made, then flowed on down to the house, so we had running water, but my aunt had the old well ya' had to drop a bucket into, then reel it back up, She never even had a telephone, but had one of those old crank phones on the wall. It only went down the hill to a neighbor's house, so if there was some sort of emergency, they could just ring the neighbor for help.

At home, even though we lived in Florida, we never had a/c (until I had already left home at 18). Never had color tv and the old B&W tv we had, had rabbit ears with tinfoil "flags" on the ends. In Orlando in the early days, we only had CBS and if we had plenty of tinfoil on the rabbit ears AND made my little sister stand next to the tv holding onto the rabbit ears with one hand, we could usually pick up a very snowy, NBC out of Daytona, usually only at night. I remember it was a really big deal when ABC opened a studio in Orlando and we actually had TWO local channels! My uncle had money and had the first remote I ever saw. You'd pick up a big box that had a wire running to the tv, then push a button and a motor with a chain drive hooked to the channel-change knob would turn the knob until you released the switch on the channel you wanted. With only two channels in town, it wasn't all that complicated, but at least he didn't have to get out of his recliner! He was also the first to have a/c (a big ol' clunky window unit) and color tv, although only a few shows (all on NBC) even had color. I remember on Sunday nights, we'd go over there to watch Walt Disney's "Wonderful World of Color". He got pretty decent reception, because he had an actual tv antenna on the roof, instead of rabbit ears.