×
×
homepage logo

Aunt Norie’s Sewing Room

By Eleanor Mckee - | Oct 23, 2012

This little lad, I think he has the real answer. After a weekend with grandma and granddad, he wanted mom and dad to kneel with him for a very special prayer. They said they couldn’t totally control the tears when they heard his words:

“Please God don’t ever stop making grandmas and granddads.”

You see, folks, I think we, seemingly the greatest worriers on this matter, had better get off our duffs, so to speak, and do something about it. Maybe that’s our job. There are more grandparents in today’s world than ever before, right?

“What in the world did you guys do?” Those grandparents were asked, of course. “We never even turned on the TV. We spent time doing, fixing, building, reading, telling stories. We hung a tire swing. There was a lot of ‘you did that all by yourself’ and ‘well, now, how did you do that, how did you figure that out?'”

Oh, how well I remember our first phone. It was following the depression, dad and the neighbor took off for the timber to cut telephone poles one day. Oh, yes, the phone company was sending (I guess ) phone wires out our way, but we had to put up the poles. You see those poles now in old movies, just tall, even crooked, skinny poles leaning this way and that way. The wires were not very tight. They hung kind of loopy between the poles. The phone was a large, rectangular box with a mouthpiece up front, a crank handle on one side and large batteries inside. It hung on the wall. To call someone, you wound up that crank and a ladies voice answered “number please.”

But the best part — so much fun to remember now — was when we got a call. The phone sounded a long and short series of rings you had to listen and count. As I remember, our ring was two longs and one short. Everybody on the line — usually five or six families, heard every ring. Of course, you were not supposed to “listen in” on your neighbors calls, but people did. You could never count on having a private conversation.

But that didn’t matter too much. That phone connected us to the outside world. We never felt so isolated. If you wanted to call your neighbor and he happened to be on your line, you just cranked his series of rings.

Connect with those kids, now. Let them know how much you really care.

— Aunt Norie, P.O. Box 265, Tonganoxie, KS 66086; auntnorie@att.net