Modern Day Conveniences

When I remember how my parents managed in the 1920s without the modern conveniences we have today, it makes me appreciate all the great things I have to use in this modern time.

I wash clothes with an automatic washer and dryer. My mother scrubbed her family's clothes on a washboard by hand, making her knuckles sore, winging them out by hand and hanging them outside on a clothesline to dry, whether it was freezing cold in winter or scorching hot in summer. The next day she ironed them all with flat irons she heated on a coal stove.

Twice a day we walked to the barn, grabbed a one-legged milk stool and sat down to the milk cows to squeeze the fresh milk out of their udders, then hauled it to the house where we separated the cream from the milk by cranking the wheel of the separator to watch the cream pour out of the top spout and the skim milk out of the bottom spout. Then we put the cream into a churn, took turns using the stomper in the crock churn until the cream turned to butter.

Our first radio had ear phones and we had to take turns listening to the news, Amos and Andy, Ma Perkins, and the Grand Old Opry. The radio got its power from batteries.

We didn't even have a telephone until I was grown, or electricity. We read by kerosene lamps and often went to bed in the dark. We had no electric appliances of course, so we got by with coal to heat and cook with. We didn't know what cell phones were, and my parents didn't live long enough to know television existed. They wouldn't believe what we have now, and how convenient everything is today.

We had to pump water by hand and carry it in buckets to the house to do laundry, and for drinking and cooking. We didn't know what a faucet looked like. We had no air conditioners either to keep the house cool in the hot South Dakota summers.

For many years they didn't own a car. When they went to church or visiting, they hooked two horses to a wagon or sled and traveled the old fashioned way.

I feel people are so spoiled today, they wouldn't know how to act if they had to survive the way my parents did in the early 1920s. Everyone should have to spend one year living without our modern conveniences the way the pioneers did in this country, then we would all learnt to appreciate all the wonderful things we have today.

The End

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