My niece, who lives in Arizona sent me an email with a lot of pictures about "how it used to be over fifty years ago". One showed a swing on a porch and people grouped around (and in) it. It was a very relaxed scene.
In the 1930's we had a very long swing on our front porch. This swing was painted green. A lot of us could safely sit in it and swing or just sit and talk. Having a swing like that was a real stress reliever. You could swing it out or talk it out. That is only of the things that I believe accounts for us in that time, to not need pills to regulate our stress levels. In fact it was not known that such things were in existence, if in fact they were.
Television had not been invented, and in some homes, no radios, we were forced to find our own entertainment with board games and made up games. We did not have a lot of free time on our hands as everyone in our family had to pitch in to keep things running smoothly.
During my growing up years we did not have super highways to get us to far away places so folks tended to live in the same area most of their lives. We also did not have the kind of cars to travel such highways. Families in small towns led church and school centered lives, where activities kept you close to home and within walking distance of the events. After the ford cars came into production any family who had a ford, just had one car. Not a lot of women could drive - my mother never learned to drive. All of her children did however, as they grew up, moved away, and it became necessary for them to get to work, etc.
People depended upon each other for many things. Families shared chores, as well as crops they grew. Our way of life gradually began to change. I well remember when oleo margarine came into being. It came in a plastic bag with a little capsule inside which was broken and then the color in it was kneaded into white oleo to make it yellow like butter. Because we had cows we always had butter but when we no longer had cows and lived in a small town and no longer on a farm, a lot of things changed, including the switch to oleo.
World War II initiated a movement toward the cities where manufacturing was in full force creating materials needed to fight the war. We gradually were being introduced to newer things, newer situations, newer people and more stress. Technology was not standing still during this upheaval, nor was medical science. As the need arose, the solution was being created to meet it. Life gradually became more stressful and a pill was there to relieve the stress or pain or what ever presented itself. The family unit was being scattered and the comfort which families provided for each other was being scattered also.
Not that there was no stress, just that we had another way of relieving it. When my brother Bill was away during the war and in a far eastern section of the world, he could not tell our mother where he was, as letters were censored. So, before he left they devised a system whereby he could let her know where he was without divulging it to others. Each paragraph in his letters would begin with the first letter of the place where he was, and she could string them together and find on a map, just where he was. This gave her a sense of some control over the situation, thus somewhat relieving the stress of not knowing exactly where he was during the war.
A lot of stress we create for outselves. Living in the time of my childhood there was less to distract you and make you worry. Of cource it could just have been my perception of how it was. But even if my parents were stressed they had no pills for it so an evening spent swinging and looking up at the stars was a nice quiet way to wind down from the day, and no pills were there to help. We had to find natural ways to calm ourselves down.
No comments:
Post a Comment