I have a rotary dial wall phone in my kitchen.
I have a mangle in the basement.
I have a treadle sewing machine.
I have a spinning wheel.
I have wooden planers, a hammered iron hammer, wooden furniture clamps.
I have a clothes line.
I have a log lifter with cast iron head that weighs a ton.
I have a wheel barrow with a iron wheel and wooden sides.
I have soapstone bed warmers and linen linens and silver silverware.
My son swears the family tractor is from the 30s. I wouldn't know. It's been there my entire life.
Sherwood road is still gravel.
Huge converted coal to oil burnham furnace from 1894.
The ice house is gone (four years ago).
The Findley Cookstove is gone.
The refrigerators that held iceblocks are gone.
The henhouse is gone.
The cows are gone.
The old 8 -0- ring 2 phone is gone, as is the much more recent party line I shared with my nearest neighbor - my aunt who happened to have the same last name,. We had an interesting 6 months when Bell misconnected a feed out at the road.
The lake is no longer the easiest car route in the winter.
The TV no longer sits with its front in the LR and open back in the closet (where we kids took out all the tubes).
The radio is no longer a 3 x 5 foot piece of furniture.
The dishwasher doesn't connect to the kitchen sink.
We no longer have a separate tap for drinking water.
The lake is no longer our summer bathtub.
No more milk delivery in glass jars;, before that milk separated in the basement after carried from the barn.
No more churning butter and ice cream.
No more Krug's bakery delivery (and there was another company before them...began with a D, I think).
No more wax on the jelly jars.
No more penny candy counter at the general store.
No more general store.
No more rowing to town to buy the Sunday ice cream, which was wrapped in newspaper (8 pints! for the thirteen children and all the adults), tied with string and put under the seat while we rowed in the hot sun the two miles from town.
No more walking three miles to town for a 5 cent ice cream cone.
No more 10 cent subway ride to Yankee Stadium (I remember when it went from 5 cents).
No more air raid drills with us crouched under our desks.
No more school desks with attached chair that one had to slide into.
The 10 cent movie price isn't missed, since we never were given money to go to the movies.
Though my sister and I went to Psycho, without permission, at a very young age, as our first movie. My older sister held my head down half way though the scariest scene.
No more Jan's Ice Cream parlour with its Kitchen Sink, no more Dipper Dan's. No more Lady's store with it's great sundaes.
Fishing trips in the bully-bull frog, a heavy wooden four seat rowboat with inboard motor and tin lined under seat fish storage bin.
We had some cool things: 1957 DeSoto station wagon, red and black, huge wings, beautiful car - semi-hemi head engine, push button transmission, custom airline seatbelts. My Dad drove that over the top of the speedometer (over 125 mph) on the newly opened Taconic Parkway when we drove to Cornwall to see Ike and Queen Elizabeth open the ST Lawrence
Seaway. Commercial GlenCo refrigerator and freezer installed around 1960. Built in Kitchenaid dishwasher of the same vintage. Great sound system built into the BigRoom in 1962 - along with our first TV since our move from Levittown in 1954.
Rooms full of books, from the 1890's on...Many, many original children's books: Just So Stories, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Uncle Remus, Beatrix Potter. We've always had hundreds and hundreds of books. Microscope and telescope. Sailboats, including to Herreschoff's. Boston Whalers. Old Town Rowboats and canoes, kayaks.
Fabulous home baked cakes and cookies and pies all the time, homemade bread. Set to rise on the Burnham furnace. (Bread machine bread just isn't the same).
FREEDOM. To live and learn and make mistakes and grow.
The Burma Shaves I remember were not stacked like those posted...one line every hundred feet or so in upper NYS...were still there fairly recently....This is something that will never come to pass, a backseat driver out of gas.
Thirty days hath September, April, June and the speed offender.
(No commercial traffic allowed!)
