If you're at least fourty-five you'll relate to this.

• getting a taste of Ivory soap for sassing your mother
• walking uphill, through cow pastures to school
• Boys: defending a younger sibling and getting a black eye
• getting a smack with a ruler by your teacher, (or worse a paddle in front of the whole class)
• having to write "I will not stick gum under my desk" on the chalkboard 100 times.
• wearing the same clothes to school or wearing the same two outfits to school all week because your parents couldn't affort to buy you new clothes. Or wearing the same pair of old tattered shoes until they practically fell apart.
• If you got new clothes, it was because your mother made them and it didn't embarrass you because that was how it was and most of your other friends clothes were either hand-me-downs or made by your mother on the sewing machine or hand-made.
• When you got bored, you went for a walk, window shopping, hanging with your friends. You read a book, maybe visited the library often. Before video games, if you were lucky enough to have one of those new VCR's you'd watch a movie.
• You're father was a hard-worker who never complained. He did what he had to to support his family. When you came home from school, and sometimes before school, you'd have "chores" to do. Chores came first before you could do anything else.
• You were made by your parents to go to church EVERY Sunday. Although you may not have wanted to, you didn't dare say so. And now you're glad you did.
• You didn't get your produce from the grocery store. You helped your mamma pick potatoes, beans, peas and carrots out of the garden. You may have even helped mom or grandma snap beans. I still love doing this! And I taught my five-year old how to snap beans.
• When an adult said, "Shame on you!" you really were ashamed and regretful.
• When Mom said, "Wait 'til your father gets home", you were frightened for your life or at least feeling the burn from his big, fat leather belt (switch).

Oh, the Good-Ol'-Days! Some of these things I have not personally lived through but my mother did and everytime she told me about The Old Days her eyes lit up. It's a strange thing. It didn't seem like much fun, but I think it had to be the Simplicity. No technology, no rushing. An easy going, layed-back way of living that I wish we had now.