Resourceful and resilient - extraordinarily so, I’ve decided. Who? My grandparents and great-grandparents. I say this based on how they lived versus how I live and having watched them adapt to grand changes.
The ones that come to mind revolve around food, water and shelter. Meeting those basic necessities used up large chunks of time and energy. They grew and raised what they ate, then preserved it. Water was carried or drawn. Living areas were not separated into private spaces with plenty of closets. Dwellings had woodstoves for warmth and cooking, outhouses and chamber pots for duty calls, cellars and smokehouses for food storage, and shelters for the animals. Electricity and phones may have been around, but households didn’t automatically come with them. Entertainment they had time for was homegrown.
When I entered the world, their homes did have electricity. On visits, I used outhouses and galvanized tubs for baths or took hurried sponge baths. I’m not sure when they acquired phones, but news came regularly in the mailbox. They had refrigerators and acquired cookstoves, relied on radios but did eventually get televisions. I don’t know what they thought about it all, but I can say one grandpa didn’t think the moon landing was legitimate.
“Adaptive” is the word I would use to describe my parents’ lives. They were born into the resourceful and resilient households lacking much that would become their normal in a few years. Resourcefulness and resilience were not missing, just different. I was born into third-floor apartment life with no air conditioning and a shared bathroom on the second floor, with a phone that Mom took off the hook during my naps. They had a television because she watched Liberace on it before Dad drove her to the hospital to have me.
Providing for a family looked drastically different as they assumed adult roles. Mom had flowerbeds, not rows of green beans and okra. She canned garden bounty from roadside markets or produce aisles. She froze items, too, and made preserves. Those chores helped the budget, but they weren’t necessary to our survival. Jobs were.
We moved back and forth multiple times between the city and Ripley County as Dad chased better jobs and a more affordable cost of living. They witnessed improvements in everything. Engines performed better and picked up power. Air and space travel escalated, communication sped up. Mysterious fax machines and microwaves scooted right into everyday life, along with air conditioning, electric typewriters then word processors, and entertainment (8-tracks, cassettes, CD’s, VCR’s). Data processing aided businesses and enhanced customer service. Computers were on the scene, but bulky, expensive and out of sight. Would Mom and Dad have adapted well to the digital age and AI?
Maybe better than I am. Smart devices and Star Link are part of my daily life, so after some inner debate, I had the landline disconnected. Within 24 hours, I changed my mind. The number assigned to the phone when installed in 1969 will remain with this physical address tied to grandparents and parents as long as it’s my address, too. It’s counter-intuitive. I know that, but allow me this. Maintaining this piece of my past surprisingly gives peace to this mind of mine in these crazy times.