A good friend recently posted photos online of the jars of salsa she’d created using fresh vegetables from a friend’s bountiful garden.

When I saw her, she said canning fruits and vegetables brought back memories of working alongside her mother in the kitchen, and those were fun times.

Looking at her photos, I found myself back in my grandmother’s kitchen, watching her fill Mason jars with tomatoes, sealing them and then putting the jars in a big pot of boiling water on the stove.

It’s been years since I thought about the old-fashioned ways of working around the house. Although many chores required a lot of elbow grease, some were actually fun, maybe because I was a kid.

I remember sitting on the back patio making home-made ice cream. Nobody wanted to turn that crank over and over, but the person who stayed with the crank got the first helping out of the bucket.

Electric ice cream makers came along and made the job easier, but most of the fun involved with home-made ice cream was sitting and waiting, just like I used to do in my grandparents’ kitchen.

The stove at their house always had a percolator on the back burner. I remember watching the coffee perk up through the small glass top, waiting for the liquid to turn dark enough so I could call out that the coffee was ready.

Listening to my friend talk about the fun she had making salsa for her family and friends, I realized my children and grandchildren will probably scratch their heads when presented with rituals such as canning vegetables.

Likewise with ironing a shirt. My grandmother taught me how to iron a dress shirt, and her way was to follow a system – start with the collar, then the yoke, sleeves and then the rest of the shirt. My boys haven’t a clue about ironing – they think shirts come out of the dryer wrinkle-free.

Hanging clothes on a clothesline is a skill few of our young people possess. They don’t realize hanging clothes requires an efficient system, including starting with a bag filled with wooden clothes pins, hanging the bag on the line and then sliding it along as you pull the clothes out of the laundry basket and clip them to the line.

Undergarments always went on the inside lines while sheets and towels went on the outside. Protects your family from the “nosy neighbors,” my grandmother always said.

Cleaning house is another old-fashioned way of life that’s quickly being forgotten. With robot vacuum cleaners and self-cleaning ovens, knowing how to clean a house is knowledge we pick up on the Internet or leave to a cleaning service.

Only those of us over a certain age remember taking scatter rugs outside once a year, hanging them over the clothes line and then beating them with a rug beater or the end of the broom to shake out the dust and dirt.

Some chores and routines I’m thrilled have disappeared – scraping Johnson’s wax off the linoleum floor and then reapplying a new coat on your hands and knees ranks right up there with taking down Venetian blinds and polishing silver.

Although it’s fun to reminisce about the past, as an adult, there’s no way I’d be without air conditioning, cruise control, permanent press shirts, computers, the microwave oven, frost-free freezers and about a thousand other modern conveniences.

The good ole days might’ve been pretty good, but as long as there’s a jar of Paul Newman’s salsa on Aisle 14, our Mr. Coffee can perk coffee in less than five minutes and my no-wax floors are shiny, I think I’ll happily remain right here in the present.
 
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.