One of the first things I built onto my house after my wife and I moved in was a ramp up to the main entrance. Our old dog had lost her ability to climb stairs, so it gave her a little more time. She left us at last, and shortly afterward, once I’d installed low rails on both sides, I wheeled my wife up and down for a couple of years. Then she left, too. Now I thank my lucky stars for that ramp whenever I come home from the market laden with a pair of bags full of groceries.
I guess the unconscious rehearsal of the ramp’s history gets me into a reflective mood. I set the bags on the kitchen countertop (careful! Don’t forget the eggs) and begin to separate the groceries into roughly four categories: refrigerator, freezer, can cabinet, and dog food corner.
This gets me thinking about the so-called good old days and the process my grandparents on both sides went through in storing food. Their houses were built before electrification and lacked hot water, as well. In my mother’s rural village of western Pennsylvania, the running water came from a countertop pump that needed to be primed before it produced. Woe to the city dude who used up or poured out the last of the water before bedtime. The privy in the backyard was unisex; everybody knew who was missing and who was out there.
My father’s parents (urbanites to the core, but from the oldest section of Albany) had running water in their three-flat house, but no hot water. The bathroom for all three floors was simply a toilet on a concrete floor in the middle of an unused coal bin on the ground floor. No light. If you had to go at night, you lit your way with an ancient rubber-clad flashlight with weak D-cell batteries (remember, it was wartime; they were hard to get). Their only bathing must have been sponge baths from a dishpan of hot water, but it never occurred to me to wonder. I do remember the bliss I experienced years later when, just after our marriage, my wife and I moved into our first apartment, equipped with a bathtub and a hot water heater (if you lit it).
Looking back, our lives then seem a bit primitive. We knew there were things we didn’t have, but what we had was enough, and I can’t remember feeling deprived in any way. One car for three households (a 1939 Chevy that my grandfather parked at the curb in front of his house on Sunday afternoons to listen to Yankees games; I suspect Gramma wasn’t a fan of baseball broadcasts in the house) didn’t seem like a hardship. In any case, the family made it work.
But back to the groceries. The Pennsylvania part of the family had gardens on their village property – corn, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, and at the back of the yard, a pigpen with two or three hogs. If they were short of food, it sure wasn’t apparent. I don’t know what they did to for cool; springhouse, maybe. The Albany set had an oak icebox on the side porch in the shade. Three doors for food, one to slide the new ice in. The ice man in a leather apron brought a new cake every few days.
I look today at the groceries that I set aside to keep cool or cold. What a difference between my situation and my Grandmother Lange’s! Ice cream, frozen vegetables, orange juice – all into the freezer with its automated ice-maker. Milk, butter, cider, eggs, cheese, spinach – into the fridge without a second thought. Poor Gramma had to know which spot in her ice box (it took me decades to get over calling a refrigerator an ice box) was the coldest. That’s where the most sensitive foods went. We could tell by sniffing if the milk had begun to go bad, and the aroma of a rotten egg is firmly engraved in my memory. That was quite rare, actually. Home delivery of milk and eggs was regular, thanks to the horse-drawn rubber-tired wagons of the Normans Kill Dairy. Bread delivered similarly by Freihofer’s. Coal, too, now I think of it, in noisy, powered dump trucks. The coal slid down a chute inside the cellar door. The dump body, in those days before hydraulics, was cranked up by hand. The sound is as firmly in my memory as that of a lonesome steam train whistle.
Last Saturday afternoon, I discovered that my house had no hot water. I called my first responder, a son-in-law who can fix anything. He came and diagnosed an empty fuel tank. Twelve gallons of fuel wouldn’t do it. But right at my hip was a solution named Siri, and just about ten-thirty that evening a fuel truck rolled up my driveway. Hot showers in the morning! It was wonderful, but a little embarrassing, too. I could just imagine my grandmother watching the whole drama as she carried the chamber pots down to the cellar, sniffing at our concern over something so trivial.
