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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Simplified life ?
  • Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:18:31 EDT

>Nostalgia is nice. Electricity is better.

>Who on this list would happily wash clothes by hand?


Like several who have already responded, we did laundry by hand for a good
while. Somewhere I have the picture of the huge galvanized tub on the wood
stove with the wringer bolted to it.

The consternation over such simplification comes from mixing metaphors. At
the time when clothes were washed by hand with water drawn from the well or
spring, people owned two or three changes of clothes and washed one of them
once
a week or so. With the advent of automatic washing machines and clothes
dryers, our opinion of what constituted clean clothes changed. In the modern
suburbian lifestyle the family will typically shower in the morning, change
into
clean clothes for the day, then after school or work perhaps shower again and
change into clean clothes. Then all those clothes, towels, and perhaps
bedding will be washed and dried and put away. The modern looks at that
mountain of
laundry and says, "Do that by hand??! Those people back then must have been
miserable!!"



You don’t hear this so much now of days but once we were admonished to ‘mind
our p’s and q’s’ and the origin of that term was guessed to be the fact that
a p and a q were mirror images of each other and could be confused in
writing. Not likely. During colonial times drinks in public houses was
taxed by the
serving. When a patron came in alone, the barkeep would draw him a pint.
But when two came in together, he drew them a quart and they shared the
single
tankard. I once listened to an unenlightened historian opine that those
people
must have drunk a lot back then judging from the number of half-gallon and
gallon steins that survived. Maybe, but the purpose of those half-gallon
steins
was to serve drink at a table of four patrons who would share the single
vessel.

This is wandering afield but the favorite fast food of the day was a tankard
of toasted bread covered with beer. The patrons were literally drinking a
toast.

The Nearings, certainly not foodies by any means, ate every meal from a
single wooden bowl (per person) and chopsticks. How much trouble would it
have
been to clean up after that??



The word ‘supper’ comes from the custom of having the main meal of the day
as a serving of bread which was broken into pieces and dipped into a common
trencher of ‘sop’. The drink was served in common pitcher which was used for
drinking from rather than pouring from.

So the horror of simplifying ones life as is being discussed here arises from
taking a 21st century fastidiousness and applying it to a pre-fossil fuel way
of doing things. There’s a happy medium somewhere along the way.



Any type of hand labor done in the proper context moves into the background
noise quickly. When we want cornbread with breakfast (grilled corn cakes),
someone wanders yawning to the crib, gets a couple ears of corn, shells them,
grinds them, and mixes up the batter. It's such second nature to all of us,
no
one thinks twice about it. People visiting stare slackjawed, "All that to
just
get bread for breakfast! That is realy too much, I could never do that."
Yet no one here thinks any more of it than making coffee or washing their
hands
or any other task that fades into the background.
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