“The only good thing about the good old days is they’re gone.”― Dick Gregory
The cold snap of the last few days have me thinking about the “Good Old Days” people wax poetic about. It is cold and windy and has me longing for the humidity and mosquitoes of summer.
Our good old days started when Linda Gail and I moved into the foothills of the Blue Ridge in 1987 just before a twelve-inch snowfall that kept us stranded for over a week. Despite questioning our sanity, the old farmhouse became our “little piece of heaven.”
An old farmhouse sitting above the Cherokee Scenic Highway, built in 1892 that had no electricity, heat or plumbing until 1956 when the new owner, long time Methodist missionary and reverend, James Copeland and some of what he called his good “Baptist Brothers” installed it. It has never been updated and I admit I sometimes worry about how well the good “Baptist Brothers” installed it.
Prior to 1956 this old house, with no insulation, was heated with a wood stove and five fireplaces, water was hauled from the stream located below the house and the outhouse was, and still is, located some thirty yards behind the house.
Would anyone like to explain to me the “Good Old Days” as it relates to the series of cold days we have experienced and the impending “Snowmageden” we are facing this weekend? I am reminded of the old childhood joke, “Have you read ‘A Mile to the Outhouse’ by Willie Makeit. The book was illustrated by Betty Don’t.”
I should point out that indoor plumbing was added in 1956 to an old porch that was closed in to accommodate it. We now have updated heat, two more bathrooms, a new well with running water and we only actively use one of the fireplaces. The insulation in the old part of the house needs to be redone but at least the old wavy lead windows were replaced.
I spent some eight hours spread over three days, cutting and splitting two pickup truck loads of dead fall with a chainsaw, axe, sledge and wedge. I also had benefit of a tractor with a frontend loader to help keep me out of trouble. My back might disagree with that last statement and has me wondering how did the previous generations keep a woodstove, and five fireplaces fed without benefit from later technology?
Hey, I’ll let you keep the good old days. I’ll take the toilet paper over the Sear’s catalogue or corn shucks any day.
Ravings of a Mad Southerner 