Let's talk to my Ancestors
Let’s ask my Ancestors
During those brief moments in our life when we get small flashes of light that represents our beginnings and our earliest thoughts, were they real or someone else’s history of us. Sometimes we have a tendency to think we remember what others say about us in our infancy. Without a reference point they are just memories without any specific time or date in place.
When you’re earliest memories are fun and loving things at home they always smell so sweet. If you’re lucky memories of pain, family hardships are used as examples for others who think their life is so damn rough. The next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you can’t get the car you wanted or the big screen TV that everyone else has, just ask an old person about life on the farm. Do you think that walking to school and milking cows before 0500 hrs every day was fun you got another thing coming.
During the 20’s and 30’s in Minnesota my parents were on two separate paths. Because life was so elementary then food, clothes and forms of entertainment all revolved from the farm in most cases. TV was not a luxury you could even get; Game Boy wasn’t in the dictionary yet and cell phone looked like something from a science fiction magazine. I guess you get the picture thus far my little impatient friends.
If you were to get injured on the farm oh let’s say you got your hand caught in the combine or trashing machine, chances are you would lose that hand and probably would die from loss of blood or infection from the dirty equipment itself. As we have at the end of a cell phone now EMS or Fire Rescue did not exist, so the trip to the local hospital would have been about 50 to 100 miles. The town’s doctor would have to either mount his horse or hope someone local had some kind of vehicle. Let’s say we survive the accident for now, there’s always tomorrow and guess who’s going to do your work then.
Let us go to school and try to forget the horrible accident that almost took your hand. From my Mother’s house it was only a short distance to the little school house she could walk it with no problem’s. My Dad’s house was in the same town but they lived a little farther away and there was no such thing as the short bus or any other form of transportation to and from school. It was either walk or ride the family horse. Of course everyone in the community or township as they were called then knew everyone else.
You think you can hide down by the lake and do something your parents didn’t know about, you had better get up a little bit earlier. There’s nothing to do in a small town but work and have a few snorts, that’s whisky for you city boys. Time kind of went a little slower back then no permanent press everything had to be hand washed and hung on the line and you if you left the clothes out to long they would be frozen on the line. Well it took pretty much all day just to get ready for tomorrow so the value of time wasn’t very important, no TV, no malls to hang out in, life on the big screen was silent but worst of all no John Wayne. Cowboys were still alive and well in the west just a little older, Al Capone was on his way to being a notorious gangster in New York still and World War I was over but yet so fresh in the minds of the survivors nothing was fun anymore.
A little word of advice the next time you get all ill because you can’t drive the family car to meet your friends and just hang out and do nothing. Take it from an old cop that has been hit by a blackjack and thrown in the back of a patty wagon before. Life is so grand the more you explore the more you learn and the further you get away from your old drab life at home and into your own misery of the fulltime life we call adult hood.
Take the time to talk to some old folks, learn a little about their past before it’s too late, find your reference point and start your own history. My friend you will be sitting in that same rocker before you know it and wondering where the time went all over again.
