This morning, I have been thinking a bit about how life has changed within the last hundred years, and how it is constantly evolving today, due to technology. Much of the allure that antiques of all kinds hold for me is that they remind me of the more simple ways of the past.
For example, I like the old apple corer/peeler devices, the treadle sewing machines, and the pitcher and washbasin, even though water had to be brought in from the well and heated on a wood stove. Somehow, we were more dependent on the land, and we had more respect for it. Animals needed to graze there, or we had to grow our vegetable crops. Open land was not just another site to build condominiums.
Seen in this photo, by Charlotte Croft, is the Clark Farm in Barnard, Vermont, a vision of loveliness on this clear summer’s day.
Looking back at the stories that people tell of life and hardships, even as experienced in the early twentieth century, makes me realize how much we take for granted today, and what a spoiled bunch of people we’ve become. A child in school without his/her own cell phone is just unimaginable. A sixteen year old “child,” without his/her own car is equally unfathomable, in some circles.
I like to sit here and think about the street outside my house at a time when it was more narrow, and lined with Elm trees, and trafficked by horses and buggies. A few years ago, Jim tore down the carriage shed on our property, before it fell down. However, it represented a different time and place that can only be re-visited by looking at old pictures of a history book of this part of town.
Of course, if I lived in any other age, I would not be writing to you on this fine day and reaching you in Australia, Canada, Germany, Peru, and many other points of the globe from where I know that readers visit this blog and our website.
Nonetheless, I can’t help but wax nostalgic over times past, and wish that I could “go there,” if only for a few days, to see and to live what it was like to try to survive in the nineteenth century, a time whose needlework I often visit.
Patricia Cummings
