The Coffe is On

A person’s upbringing prepares them for life in so many ways.  Even as a mature adult I continue to realize the strong aftereffects of childhood conditioning.  If we take a moment and reflect upon our childhoods and all the people, experiences, and things that molded who we have become, we realize that who we are today is directly tied to those long-ago days.  From the least remembered detail to the most profoundly impressed occurrence, we move forward in our lives with all of them firmly tied to us.  At this time in our country – a time that for many has brought about significant challenges – the impressions of the children we once were seem to bubble to our consciousness and into our adult psyche and direct our focus, emotions, actions, and relationships.  Unless we have become a Buddha sitting serenely upon a mountaintop, a large part of who we are, emotionally, is still that youngster trying to understand their world.  This is especially true when the world hands us challenges the like of which we have never faced before.  Speaking from the only experience I know, my own childhood prepared me to face many of the challenges of today.  My family was not wealthy; we did not live a luxurious or even comfortable life at times.  We moved every 2 years on average.  We either made do, did otherwise, or did without much of the time.  Dad hunted and Mom butchered the moose, caribou, and other game that provided meat.  Mom and we kids picked berries for the jams, jellies, and syrups that kept winter sweeter and memories of summer close.  We gardened, borrowed, handed down, garage swapped, bartered, and worked very hard for a decent living.  Most of that life was spent in various areas of Alaska.  Our closest neighbors at times were the black bear that roamed our property.  We regularly fished for salmon and trout and when money was especially tight, Dad sent the kids down to the riverbank to literally grab salmon out of the rivers by hand – when the game warden was away.  We had no TV until I was age 8.  Our home was heated by a wood burning furnace and many, many summer hours were spent ‘helping’ Dad saw logs on his homemade sawhorses.  We would sit on astride the logs, supposedly to keep them from rolling in the sawhorse but secretly I believe that it was just to keep us up and away from the old loggers saw that he used.  Our water was from an old hand-dug well on our property.  Our sewer was our own septic that sometimes – well, didn’t work all that well and the honey buckets had to come out until it was repaired.  We did have electricity but it was sparsely used because it was expensive.  We had a small refrigerator so Mom kept many food items in a hand dug root cellar.  Mom cooked on a wood burning cast-iron stove and it was a challenge at times to keep things from burning or undercooking.  We had not telephone for years and when we finally were able to afford one, it was a 4-party line.  Our garbage service was – us.  When it piled up, Dad loaded it into the old International and took it to the local dump – which was free use.  On occasion Mom and Dad would host or attend a party with friends.  Card playing was the main activity.  Home-brewed beer (by that I mean that it was made in the neighbors bathtub) was the drink of only choice and snacks were smoked salmon and reindeer sausage from the hunting season.  Music was provided by an old record player and the same old records that were played the last time everyone got together.  Once a year Mom would have us kids huddle around the handmade kitchen table where she would flop down the Sears & Roebuck catalog and announce, ‘I’ve saved up and I’m getting ready to order one of their Big Boxes of You-Get-Whatever-The-Store-Puts-In-There’.  You see, in Alaska there were no stores to visit for ready-made clothing or much of anything else for that matter.  Everything had to be ordered from that mysterious place, ‘The Lower 48’.  There was no way of knowing what fabrics the box would contain.  It was the left-over from whatever didn’t sell stateside and that is why it was very inexpensive.  But we could hardly wait until it arrived and the tug of war began for the various contents.  Other than that fabric, many of our clothes were made from flour sacks, or any other type of fabric that Mom could find.  Her old green Pfaff sewing machine held a prominent place in our living room because it was a very important piece of equipment to the family.  Nothing in our home that contained fabric was NOT made on that machine.  Every blue moon or so Mom and Dad would load all us kids into the truck and we’d make the long drive to the nearest town to see a movie and have Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner.  We kids would be so starved in anticipation of that chicken that we’d be nearly nauseous by the time we pulled up to the restaurant.  Mom cut all of our hair in the kitchen and that’s where the girls got their Toni perms, too.  Sometimes those perms didn’t turn out well and we would wash our hair as often as possible to try to get the perm to wash out!  During the school year we kids were bussed to the nearest school which was a long ride.  During the summers we had nowhere to go but the Great Outdoors so we spent all of our time playing hide-and-seek in the tall grass (hoping that no bears were hanging out there as well), pounding nails and old boards into rickety rafts to float on the nearby pond (mostly they just sank but we kept trying), and just hanging out with Mother Nature and enjoying the fresh air.  If we made the mistake of moaning about feeling bored, we were given chores to do.  So we made sure that we kept plenty busy doing other stuff!  The Big Weekly Evening was Sunday when, after dinner and all the baths were taken, and after the girls had hurriedly washed, dried, and put away the dinner dishes, we all sat to watch the Disney Show. 

It wasn’t until I became an adult and moved away to start my own independent life that I ‘learned’ how underprivileged my childhood had been.  Over the years I’ve been informed that the unprocessed milk we drank straight from the cow was dangerous, the meat and fish we ate was probably inferior, the fact that our water was not fluoridated was a big mistake.  The fact that we ran around all summer in our bare feet because shoes were supposed to be worn only for school, were then put away in summer to be passed down for the next child to wear the following school year, and new ones were a rarity – well, that was somehow tragic.  The fact that our clothes were so humble and that Mom made them from scratch had an undertone of poverty.  And how terrible it must have been to have to toil in a garden, berry patch, river, or forest to find our food!  And didn’t I realize that using wood for heat and cooking was just plain wrong?  I’ve been asked ‘whatever did you do for fun?’  If they only knew.

Growing up under the sky, swimming in the streams, eating the goods of the forest and river, being friends with yourself because you were the only kids around for company, learning to do with or manage without, learning to bend with the wind and to find the good in almost everything, knowing how to survive without modern amenities and LIKE it, are lessons I would never trade.  I live a comfortable life today by any standards.  It is a blessing and I do not take it for granted.  I marvel every day that the local Safeway holds almost every food a person could want – all year long.  TV is a marvel with cable service.  Books come delivered over the air to my Kindle.  I even take college classes in my pajamas at my laptop!  I sew but only because I want to, not because I would otherwise be without clothes.  My propane heating system, modern septic system, water from a community well, dependable electric service, weekly garbage pickup, and other luxuries are still a marvel to me.  Not a day goes by that I am not thrilled to NOT need to haul dirty clothes to the Laundromat, climb down into a root cellar to retrieve foods, stoke up the wood stove in order to make coffee – in a metal pot on top, sweep bare floors with brooms, and wait until pots and pots of hot water were finally ready to pour into the big metal tub for a bath – which everyone took in turns in the same water.  My home is a marvel – it is carpeted, contains modern appliances, has a single-use phone line AND cell phones, is maintained, painted, repaired, etc., on a regular basis.  There are police services, fire stations, and hospitals within a few minutes’ drive.  Anything and everything I could possibly want to eat, buy, read, hear, watch, and do is available. 

All is made available because I, my husband, and others have worked very hard to gain this lifestyle.  And we are the fortunate ones who were able to find the opportunities to do so.  But in a flash, it could all be gone.  Whether by financial misfortune, natural or other disaster, etc., it could disappear.  Am I scared?  No way.  To me all this is a blessing.  It is not something I ever once expected to attain or thought I was entitled to in any way, or believe is mine forever.  It is wonderment.  But if hard times do fall, and if I and other folks in this country find ourselves in dire circumstances, it won’t surprise me at all.  And it won’t scare me either.  Instead, I’ll pack my memories of this luxurious lifestyle into my heart and I’ll go back to the life that is far more real in this old world.  Most people live in conditions that I did as a child – or worse.  I managed and can again if need be.  You’ll find me gardening, putting by, jamming and making jellies and syrups, sewing, fishing, and doing every other activity that I was conditioned to do and to expect to do when a child.  Maybe that is the morale of this story – when we return to what we know best, it can be comfortable even if it is something that many folks would consider wanting.  Well, if you hear singing and humming and see a column of steam rising from a wood stove in the dwelling next door, that will be me.  Come on over for a cup of percolated coffee and a piece of coffeecake but give me 20 minutes warning to stove up the fire first.