Clothes don't make the (wo)man . . .

I opened my eyes following a little power snooze during Dr. Oz today and was startled into laughter by my own attire. Yes, I laughed out loud. Bear in mind that this show airs between one and two on weekday afternoons and that most civilized folk are fully dressed at this hour in clothing they wouldn’t mind being seen in by all and sundry. Now understand that I am a happily retired woman over 55 whose spouse is at work and who occasionally chooses to remain in comfy clothes until Julie returns at 5:45 p.m.

What if someone comes to the door you ask? I hide. Yes, hide. I keep all the doors locked anyway. I pretend not to be here. The dogs will bark obligingly, but I will not come to the door.

Comfy clothes sometimes means not very many clothes. (Fake blush.) Hey! It’s my home, my fortress, my domain. On major cleaning days it makes little sense for me to get up, get dressed, get myself and clothes all dirty, then shower and change. So I do housework in my nightgown. Or less.

Okay, okay. Mostly I do this on the second floor only where there are no windows without shades or curtains. Relax. The cats and dogs don’t care, so why should you? For the first floor tasks, I will don a t-shirt and yoga pants. And sometimes I’ll even coordinate them if I know the UPS man is coming or I’ve called for someone to come fix the front door lever assembly.

Many days, however, when no such interruptions are expected, I grab what’s closest with little or no regard for anything except its warmth and coverage value. And that’s what cracked me up when I opened my eyes from my little nap earlier. I was wearing my grey t-shirt with the screen-printed aqua, red, lime green, coral, black and yellow Travel Tarts in Mexico logo; a pair of fuzzy fleece pj pants in a lovely pea-green and black check with little dogs all over, and my eggplant-hued slippers. As if that were not a sufficiently rude assault on the eyes, I was wrapped in my silky faux-leopard throw. I looked like Frenchy’s had mated with Animal Kingdom.

People who know me well don’t drop by unannounced. They know better. You can try it, but I won’t answer. I’ll be upstairs laughing at my get-up.

How did they manage?

I am sitting here listening to the soft hum of the dryer going downstairs in the laundry room and recalling a conversation with my dear aunt Freda and cousin Lynda on Monday of this week. We've decided how important it is for us to get together more to record the bits of our family history before no one is here to tell how it was in her coming of age days. Sadly, my own mother, the eldest of three girls, died in 1999 at age 67, and the youngest, Lois died in the summer of 2008 at age 72. With them went parts of the story except for what we remembered, sometimes accurately and  sometimes vaguely, depending on how interesting it seemed to the listener.


In my thirties, I was keen to take notes from my grandparents' tales of their own childhoods and teen years, growing up in Hants County from births in 1910, and 1911. Through the years of WWI, the twenties, marriage in 1930 and onward. How happy I am that I wrote down as much as I did. Nothing gives a stronger sense of how historical bias and revisionism happens then trying to piece together the whys and hows of your own family story.


Back to Monday, however.  Over tea and cake with lemon filling, Freda shared with us some notes she had begun writing of her earliest memories of life in Morden, then moving down into the valley to Aylesford when her father went to sea in the merchant navy in 1940. Even before her husband went away on ships, our grandmother as a young wife had to be resourceful and was absolutely insistent, no matter how little they had, that her family be comfortable and presentable. Much emphasis, then, was placed on having clean laundry.

Hauling well water to be heated if there was no indoor pump was normal for her. The washtub and scrub board with homemade lye soap and later Sunlight occupied many of her days, as grandfather's clothes from the sawmill or cranberry bog got very dirty. How hard this must have been on the hands of countless women who toiled and scrubbed their family's laundry clean! Not just shirts and pants, but sheets and quilts and heavy outer clothing. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.


No wonder my aunt's face lit up when she told of the luxury of them owning a machine when they moved down the mountain! I actually remember this behemoth which stood in Nana's kitchen corner, silent and hulking, until laundry day. It was electric with mysterious levers and rollers and on "the day" we were cautioned to keep fingers away and be scarce.

On fine breezy days, baskets of wet things were taken out the back door and hung to flap dry on crisscrossed clotheslines all over the back yard. All I could see sometimes were my grandmother's feet several rows over as she hung piece after piece up with wooden pins. In winter or on rainy days there was an apparatus in the kitchen which could be lowered to hang clothes on, then raised by a pulley-system to dry over the woodstove's heat.

Gaaaah! So much lugging and scrubbing, and wringing, draining, rinsing, wringing. And I haven't even mentioned the ironing.


I count myself so lucky to have been born in the fifties and to have had the true ease of automatic laundry appliances all of my life. Still, there is something so comforting about the smell of clothing dried on a line in fresh valley air that nothing can replace.


Thank you Great-Gram, Nana, and all my foremothers. I don't know how you did it.

Be prepared

People, people. Do you suddenly forget everything you know about about cooking when there is snow in the forecast? Why does the mention of the white stuff in amounts over twenty centimetres send otherwise sensible folks to the supermarket in droves for bread and milk? Why those two items? What cataclysmic force will make you forget all the other good things in your cupboards and refrigerators in favour of a loaf of sliced bread and a two litre carton of Farmers finest one percent? What about the lure of fresh vegetables, diced and sliced for a crunchy stir-fry? Are thoughts of a slow-simmered lamb curry obliterated by the cascading white flakes outside the window?


It is unlikely here in Nova Scotia that a blizzard will interrupt our normal routines for longer than a day or so.  Our towns are well-equipped with snow plows and removal equipment, and we are not novices when it comes to digging or snow blowing ourselves out of the drifts in our driveways. "Snow events", as the TV and radio meteorologists like to call these storms, are nothing more than what we're used to living where we live. A good nor'easter or two is a fact of life in winter.


And yes, sometimes when the snow is heavy and wet, or the wind is wild, we do lose power. But what sensible Canadian doesn't have a propane barbecue or Coleman stove? Many have wood stoves for their primary or secondary heat source; it's not as if we have to subsist on cold sandwiches. But always at the stores, it's the bread and milk shelves that are emptied first. 


Milk, I can understand somewhat. There are things you need milk for, especially if you have kids who will eat cereal without hesitation but look suspicious when you offer them chicken soup that you made from scratch and cooked on your woodstove. You need milk to make (acckkk!) Kraft Dinner. 


But milk and bread? Come on, what are you thinking? Bread pudding? French toast? A poultice to draw an ingrown toenail? Are you planning to mix the two and use it to caulk cracks around that old window?


Sheesh.