That Was Then

It wasn't just me inspecting the mown yards yesterday.  I think the vulture and I were both surprised that there is so little green left in the front yard.

(Umm, Beau, ya missed a spot in the west field.)  I am just so thankful that I can walk down to the goat pen now without getting paranoid about rattlers hiding in the weeds.  The timing was great because the whirly-gigs were just starting to bloom.  Maybe there will be fewer of those dreadful seeds that bore into everything with the flowers gone.

I was watching an episode of MasterChef and Gordon Ramsey was laughingly showing an old-time rotary beater.  That's what I grew up with.  I remember cranking away, taking turns with my mother when she'd make Divinity candy at Christmas time, and it took for-ev-er.  It wasn't until I was married that I got an electric hand mixer and thought that was big time.  Much later there was a stand mixer, and now I've got the star of the show, a KitchenAid!  I was fourteen when my mother got an automatic washer and dryer.  Before that, she and I used a tub washer with a wringer and a clothesline.  It was good training, because when I got married I was right back to the tub and wringer, doing daily loads of handmade flannel diapers.

I was slow moving into the 20th century.  I had all four Kids before I got an automatic coffee maker, having gotten used to perking the coffeepot on the stove.  It wasn't until we'd moved to Sacramento that I got a microwave, even then not sure why I needed one, and didn't get a food processor until I was up here.  A good knife was all I'd ever needed to slice and dice.  Computers, cellphones, wireless phones...wow.

That was then, this is now.  All the marvelous modern conveniences that I can't imagine being without.  Most of the millennials would think I came out of the Dark Ages.  They might be right.