Nostalgia

The young live for the future, the middle-aged live for the
present but most older folks live for the past. These memories
become their greatest possession and what a wonderful thing that
the ‘Good Lord’ has blessed us with, this ability to retain
these memories and even more so in our life time; more than any
other equal time in History.

I have noticed one common denominator in all of this, the person
having overcome the greatest obstacles and hardships seem to have
the richest memories.

Persons having been born as the saying goes with a silver spoon
in their mouth, having plenty, and few hardships feel that they
have few memories worthwhile for they have not had to join the
fight for survival, using some hidden talents, and improvise to
meet the challenge of the more primitive times and conditions. To
some extent I pity that person who has always had plenty, for to me
he was denied the chance to fully develop a fine list of
memories.

Many of these memories are relatively simple, such as feeding
calves and pigs, walking a few miles to the one room school,
shucking corn for the stock, walking barefooted behind a plow, but
as with most people my greatest memory is of the steam traction
engines thresher, and sawmill. I grew up with these, and they ended
several years ago. I still have a vivid memory of this part of my
life and keep it revived by making a few visits to the
reunions.

I am not financially able to own any of these things, but do
enjoy watching them, and for the next best thing, I have recently
made a wood model of a Case engine and separator. To relive some of
these older customs, induced by the gas shortage, I have attached a
swinging arm to my fireplace, and cook many things over the fire in
a heavy iron pot. It could be partly imagination but it seems that
the beans, pot roasts are more delicious cooked in this manner,
yum, yum, good, and I now realize that perhaps grandpa was not so
bad off after all.

For some reason it seems that we can remember our early life
better than we can the present. We might go to the store and forget
the bacon, but if it is something that happened sixty or seventy
years ago, well that is different.

This brings to mind something I heard. These two old timers were
talking, and one of them was heard to say; there are two things
that happens when we get old, one was that we do not remember as
well as we used to, but he forgot what the other thing was, but we
are like the evolutionist, we can always pick it up if we go far
enough back in time.