My grandparents, Albert and Mary Reed, lived near town, just across the road, and they, therefore, had electricity. It wasn’t much of a house by today’s standards, a kitchen, a living room and three bedrooms. There was an outhouse behind the house. Later on, after getting the town to run a water line across the road, they built a bathroom on the back of the house. The house was built in an “L” fashion, with the living room and kitchen in one of the legs and the three bedrooms in the other. I never knew my grandparents to share a bedroom. Running alongside the inside of the “L” of the house was a screened in porch they retreated to during the day for some cooler comfort on a hot summer’s day and beds were kept there for sleeping on those hot summer’s nights.
When I was young they got a propane tank and brought gas into the house for cooking and heating. Before that, they had a kerosene stove they used for cooking and I do not remember what they used for heating.
At some point, again because of the proximity to town, they were able to get electricity. People today don’t have any idea what it was like to live without electricity or just how much getting that one little item of modernity raised one’s standard of living. And, for those who are now for the first time contemplating what it must have been like to get electricity for the very first time, one should be careful not to think what we had was anything like what people have today, either the electricity or those appliances which run on it. There may have been an outlet in each room, but no more than a single one. They had a yard light which was seldom used. And, there was a single light, one bulb, probably no more than a 40 watt bulb, if not a 20 watt, suspended on an electrical cord from the ceiling in the middle of the room with a pull chain switch on the socket.
These amazing technologies astounded me as we had neither at the farm. I loved going there and spending the night when I was 4 or 5 years old. I always slept in my grandmother’s bed and I loved her room. She had shown an absolutely brilliant adaptability to contemporary technology, especially considering the time period was the late 1940s and she was born in 1883. She had tied a string, a piece of yarn, to the chain on the switch and the other end onto the post of the headboard on her bed. That way, late at night, when the shadows had been driven into hiding by the darkness, she could merely lift her arm over and turn the light on and off from the comfort of her bed. I don’t know how often I lay there before she came to bed and reached over turning the light on and off.
My daughter had a ceiling fan with lights in her room. There were two switches on the wall next to the door, one operating the light and the other operating the fan itself. On the fan fixture, there were two chains, one for the light and the other for the fan. She was very young and complained that she had to get out of bed and go over to the door to turn her light off and on at night. I told her the story of my grandmother’s light switch and the next time I went upstairs, she had two strings running from the ceiling fan to the post on her headboard. She showed me how she was able to turn her light on and off at night without ever getting out of bed.
With that, this little girl, born in 1997, was reaching back into the past by way of kinship, forming a relationship with someone she never met and never knew who was born more than a century earlier.
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