How A Disaster Changed Our Family
Dec 15 '00 (Updated Jul 12 '01)
The Bottom Line Learn your priorities and place family first and above all else.
Updated------Last December, our area had a horrendous ice storm. The worst in ten years. Our town and the surrounding towns, looked like a war zone of mass destruction covered over with ice. Over 380,000 people were without electricity and some without water due to the distribution centers not having the power to supply water. There were still over 110,000 people without electricity weeks later.
My personal enlightening began with that storm. I knew something good had to become of it.
We were one of the many families without electricity, although we were fortunate enough to have water. For three days we were without modern luxuries. We heated our living room with our wood burning fireplace. We cooked in the fireplace and sat wrapped in blankets on the living room floor directly in front of the blazing fire to keep warm, while we played card games by candlelight to past the time and just talked and laughed.
My husband went to work every morning and there I was at home alone, without heat, and working very hard keeping the fire going all day long, carrying firewood in daily. There wasn't television, video games, music, and worst of all, I was without my blessed computer. All I could do is sit on the fireplace’s brick hearth to keep warm and work on one of my oil paintings or read a book by candlelight.
That experience had me thinking and appreciating, the luxuries that we were born into. The luxuries we evolved into throughout the years due to our modern technologies. The luxuries we take for granted everyday, like breathing without thinking about it.
What did families do in the 1800’s? How did they keep warm? How did they cook their meals? How did they bathe in such cold temperatures and without running water? What did families do at night when it got dark and cold? What did they do for their entertainment and to pass their time?
Men were busting their buns working in their fields tending their crops, tending to livestock, mending fences, hunting for food for their families, making repairs around their homesteads, building new barns or smokehouses and chopping firewood daily.
Women were busy sewing their clothes by hand, stitch for stitch, mending clothes, making quilts by hand from scraps of left over material, gathering fresh eggs, feeding the chickens, killing a chicken and plucking it for dinner, washing clothes by hand, caring for the children, preparing foods and canning fruits and vegetables, curing meats and cooking in iron pots dangling over their wood burning fires that must have blazed twenty-four hours a day.
Bartering was common when they didn’t have money to buy goods. They traded their services of manual labor, or their goods they had to offer, for things they needed that others had to offer them. Men traded their manual labor helping friends and neighbors in exchange for foods they grew from their crops, or a horse, cow, maybe a chicken or two, and maybe a nice dress that the man’s wife handmade to give to his wife as a surprise birthday gift or Christmas present.
Women also bartered just like the men. They handmade dresses and quilts and bed linens and took them into town once a month to the general store and exchanged those things for sugar, flour and salt.....maybe even a nic-nac for her husband or her children, as a present for them.
They sat by candle light after dark and played cribbage together on a board that the father hand whittled from raw wood with a pocket knife. If they were literate, they read to their children by candle light. They played the violin, guitar or harmonica to fill their lives with music and sang songs together. The girls would help their mother sew a quilt and the boys would help their father whittle or make something for their homestead.
Before dawn, their day would start over again, ending in the same fashion as the day before. They didn’t have television, video games or computers to consume their time and erase their minds into blanks, void of all normal thought process. They had will power and determination. We all know that necessity is the mother of invention, and they had imagination and creativity to invent. Their minds were occupied with thoughts of things they needed to do and constantly thinking and planning for the next task at hand, or what tomorrow would hold. They were family and they had harmony and unity. They had their values in the right place, their family. They had true grit.
Does that life sound boring and mundane?
I thought so once, but not completely now. We didn’t have television, video games, music or a computer to occupy our time and empty our minds into blank oblivion for three days. What did we miss? Eye strain, headaches, back aches, shortened hamstrings, and wider, fatter butts from sitting at the mercy of these hypnotic, mind controlling electronics of luxuries. These artificial luxuries that separate the family members from one another.
Did I miss these things? Yes. I’ll admit that I did. We all did. Do I have a new perspective of how I should spend my time with my family? Yes, you bet. I sure do. My entire family does now.
But, television, video games, and computers 24/7 isn’t a life. It’s a learned existence we’ve all become brainwashed into thinking is the norm.
These electronic gadgets combined, has to be partially responsible for the breakdown of the family unit. They have to be partially responsible for parent’s lack of communicating with their kids and not knowing what’s happening in their lives. They have to be to be partially responsible for couples lack of intimacy and truly knowing one another due to the lack of communication. Where are the family values when the kids are in another room watching television or playing video games while you're face is glued to another television in the living room all night long, or on the computer all day and night?
My family had decided to spend at least one evening a week together without the television, video games and computer. All luxuries turned off. We made a fire in our fireplace, drank hot chocolate and cappuccino together, and once in awhile, a nice wine and played cards, dominoes and other games. Or, we’d simply talk and laugh. We spent quality time together.
We wanted the family harmony and values our ancestors had together. We wanted the unity that they shared.
We knew it would be difficult to achieve, but we planned to be independent of these luxuries that exhaust our time together. We planned to purge our family together into a more balanced unity full of communication, laughter and togetherness. To learn to get to know one another better.
That's family values...love and family esteem of the highest caliber.
That day had changed my life.
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