Dear Mom, you'd be so amazed!

Dear Mom,

Today I was thinking about you as I cleaned house.  So much has changed in our Western Canadian world since 1987 when you departed this earth and even more of course since your early years spent on the Prairies before I was born in 1948. It would boggle your mind – it boggles my mind too!

For starters, keeping house no longer takes every day all day!

You'd be so amazed!

I know you appreciated your vacuum cleaner. I don't know when you bought your first one but they've stayed more or less the same until the amazing one I have started using.   It's a computerized robot vacuum cleaner!  It runs itself back and forth across the floor until it decides it has covered the whole area at which point it returns back to it's base! Doesn't matter the type of flooring - carpet or tile or wood - and it does a really great job! Then I washed the floors - but not on my hands and knees with a bucket of icky water - I stand erect using a cloth pad at the end of a handle which is attached to a small container of cleaning fluid that I spray out at the press of a button. Remember the big rugs that had to be cleaned by carrying them outside and beating the dirt out with a stick? No more! 

Then I put clothes on to wash.  That doesn't take all day Monday any more. I have an automatic washer that does a better job than any you ever saw. I sprinkle in some detergent, choose how hot I want the water to be and how long it should wash, then press a button and before long they are ready to be dried. No more heating the water on the woodstove, and pouring it into the washer. Remember when wringers were a wonderful invention except when they crunched the fingers? I have settings on my washer and dryer that I've never used and am not even sure what they do!

Modern detergents are so good - can't think when I used bluing last.  We certainly don't make our own soaps now. We don't pull pails of water up the well either. And we don't melt snow - all of which I know you did.

When the timer dingles to tell me the clothes are washed, I pull them out and promptly put them into the dryer where they roll around and are dry in no time.  Sometimes I still like to hang them outside because they smell so nice, but hardly anyone has a clothesline. I don't, so I have to lay them across chairs or something – my grandmothers would be speechless. No more do we pin them to clotheslines and bring them inside all frozen to a crisp in the winter. There are actually machines available that do it all - both wash and then dry the clothes - incredible!

About ironing - no one irons their sheets, pillowcases or even very many of their clothes these days. We have fabric blends and processes that almost eliminate the necessity. The shame of it is I have a great iron that hardly gets used. Plug it in, set the desired temperature, fill with water and a nice amount of steam takes the wrinkles out. Remember sprinkling and rolling the clothes so they were a bit damp before ironing them? And remember way back when women had to heat the irons up on the cast-iron cookstove?! Oh, I almost forgot to mention that my iron has an auto-off too. The other day I forgot it was plugged in but fortunately when I finally remembered, it was stone-cold - it had turned itself off when it sat idle for too long.  How amazing is that!

Then it was lunch time.  I decided to make soup.  There are so many options -- I can buy dozens of varieties of soups in cans or packages. Just heat and serve. Have I mentioned the microwave oven? Cooks everything in a few minutes more evenly now than in the 80's. Couldn't do without it! But I decided to prepare the soup the almost old-fashioned way. First of all soup needs a base. However, since I haven't killed a chicken or even boiled one in ages, I used a commercially prepared soup base.  Did I go to the cellar to get some vegetables?  No!  Bought all the ingredients at the store of course. I used fresh ones but could have bought an infinite variety of frozen or otherwise prepared vegetables (called "veggies" these days). I chose from a huge variety of herbs and spices to ramp up the flavour. Not ones that I grew or dried I'm ashamed to admit.  What goes with soup? Why bread of course.  Not for me the weekly kneading and rising and baking. Every kind of bread we can think of is readily available in more than one store a short distance from my house.  Butter? You guessed it. No milking cows and churning - just a trip to the dairy aisle.

In fact, I don't even have to make a trip to the store. Don't even need to phone in an order. All I need to do is look up a product on my computer and click on the word, delivery. Or I can have ready to cook meal packages waiting on the doorstep when I get home with all the necessary ingredients included, or I can go online to various restaurants and choose cooked meals to be delivered piping hot. No longer are we limited to what was grown in the garden then put in the cellar or canned or frozen. We have every conceivable food available from around the world all year long. Of course it costs money but not as much as you'd expect.

Time to do dishes and clean the stove. I have a skookum automatic dishwasher. It hardly matters how dirty, greasy or caked-on or messy the dishes are, stack them on the racks, pour in some detergent, press start and an hour later they come out shining clean. The old cookstoves were a force unto themselves, weren't they?! Someone had to cut the right wood, split to the right size and length, carry the wood in, carry the ashes out. It was a skill to maintain the heat of the fire just so for best cooking results. Of course the ladies were happy to add to their kitchens an efficient new electric range when they could.  I love the gleaming polished look of the old cast iron cookstove but can't quite remember what was used - was it something called stove black? Ironically I have recently upgraded my electric ring stove to a new fangled flat ceramic top and guess what? It takes plenty of elbow grease and a special cleaner to keep it shiny!

Electricity - everything runs on electricity.  No more do we fill coal oil lanterns and polish their chimneys. We have more heating and lighting conveniences than you can shake a stick at!  And almost every kitchen activity that grandma did with a kettle or frying pan, a bowl, a wooden spoon and a knife now can be done using a kitchen appliance. And certainly we have wonderful refrigerators that are a far cry from iceboxes. I remember the great hunks of ice the men would cut out of the lake and cover with hay so they'd stay frozen for half the summer providing a cold storage area. 

I recall you sitting at your sewing machine. Certainly there was a treadle in most homes for doing the basics. There are computers in sewing machines now too - how crazy that would be for dad in his frequent role as Singer repairman - they can do such fancy stitches! Ladies spend huge amounts of money to buy fabric and create handmade quilts as a hobby. You used to use fabrics and remnants to be thrifty!

In the afternoon, will I don my hat and walk or take the horse and buggy to visit a neighbour? Nope.  I'll sit down at my computer and see who has emailed, tweeted, messaged, or skyped - those are all words that didn't exist in 1948.  I can get in touch with someone instantly. And phoning? Remember the telephone operator who sat and plugged and unplugged cords to put people's calls through? That's all done by computers these days. We used to be signalled to pick up when we heard our ring. Was it one long and two shorts when we lived in Manitoba? Today a computer voice even announces the caller when the phone rings.  Hardly anyone has an actual telephone line coming into their house, we've gone wireless. 

Have I mentioned smartphones? The crazy little gizmos no bigger than the palm of your hand can make phone calls from almost anywhere at all to almost anywhere at all - it can link to big computers called the internet and link further to almost any other computer anywhere at all - it has a camera in it - just click and you can see the results instantly and can print them out at home in a jiffy. This'll blow you away - a smart phone can link to a smart fridge to tell me what I have or don't have in it! And it can contain whole books to read - turn your furnace up/down/on/off - can open/close the blinds - can control cameras set up inside or outside your house so you can see what happens when you're not home - and more abilities are being added all the time. I can't keep up!

I have a link to a Bible on my smartphone - as many versions of the Bible as I like, not to mention commentaries, atlases and the like. Many of us take our phones to church rather than carry a bulky printed Bible.

Actually, mom, there are too many things that have changed over the past years.  I'm getting all tangled up in trying to describe them.  And I can't imagine how much more will change during the next generation. But we've lost a lot too. We have little connection to the soil, to the seasons or to the animals that we feed, that feed us, or that we live amongst. I wish my granddaughters could spend a year on an old traditional farm near Metiskow to feel and absorb all those things I remember so poignantly. The crazy thing is that that sort of back to the land philosophy has spawned a vacation industry and many farmer's markets where we go and spend extra money to buy vegetables that still have the smell of God's green earth on them.

Things are different. Our workaday world has changed. It matters little, though, how we wash clothes or do dishes because what really matters is that we have family and friends to do it for or with and that we have purpose in life.

Mom, I can't help but think of Ecclesiastes 3. You did the housework that had to be done in your time. Now it’s my time. It’s the same, but different.  

Finding satisfaction in it is the gift.

There is a time for everything,

    and a season for every activity under the heavens:

     a time to be born and a time to die,

     a time to plant and a time to uproot,

     a time to kill and a time to heal,

     a time to tear down and a time to build,

     a time to weep and a time to laugh,

     a time to mourn and a time to dance,

     a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

     a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

     a time to search and a time to give up,

     a time to keep and a time to throw away,

     a time to tear and a time to mend,

     a time to be silent and a time to speak,

     a time to love and a time to hate,

     a time for war and a time for peace.

 What do workers gain from their toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.  He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.  That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.