"Electricity"

Back in the early days of electricity, my grandma's small town had a community refrigerator.  Each family contributed to its purchase, and each had a designated area in a chilled room which was the size of a small store.  This fascinates me.  Can you imagine leaving your supper someplace where anyone could touch it, take it, sneeze on it?  I imagine everyone was considerate and cooperative.  Those people knew how to work together and helped each other in a million different ways.  Some people fantasize about living in a castle, I think about the community refrigerator.

I obviously don't want to sacrifice my personal fridge to walk to a store for my food every day.  I just want to experience a gentler time when people are nicer.  Maybe I'm dreaming as much as the people who want to be Cleopatra in a past life.  Maybe people have been and always will be a combination of saints and psychopaths, but I bet they at least acted nice if they needed help to raise a barn?

I was instructed to create a 70s kitchen for this illustration in "Mensa Bulletin" magazine (which printed in the same article with the boy I posted a couple of weeks ago).  This isn't the kitchen I grew up with.  Our kitchen was from the 50s or before.  I aspired to a 70s kitchen.  I wanted a Harvest Gold side by side refrigerator with ice cube and water dispensers in the door, but the multi-generational wisdom of my family is all appliances should be white.  White is always in style, goes with everything, cleans easily, and matches replacement appliances.  This is ultimately sensible and kind of boring.  I admired my friends' colorful kitchens.  I wanted to be in style too.

Suddenly, Harvest Gold was out.  Eyes were rolled when anyone saw it.  So passé!  How long are you going to keep that?!  Something significant clunked in my mind.  If the refrigerator is still good, why replace it?  Because some nameless person decreed you had to spend money?  And it wasn't just the appliances, you had to buy new clothes too, and probably a car.  Throw out everything you own and get new stuff that looks exactly like everyone else's new stuff!  Conform!

Except for a wild college moment when I painted my rusty refrigerator with school bus yellow Rust-Oleum, all my appliances have been white.  Maybe boring practicality is in my DNA.  I still get ice from a tray and water from the tap.  I don't want a Harvest Gold anything.  Certainly not an orange countertop.

Grandma said ignore popular styles.  Buy classics of quality.  They last forever and you'll always look right.  Excellent advice.  A little boring like the white appliances, but very sensible on a budget.  She said the key was to accessorize and dazzle with a sparkling personality.  She was a very smart woman.

Maybe part of her wisdom came from growing up with a communal refrigerator where it was bad taste to show off?  Neighbors had to get along.  If someone else was having a hard time, give them a hand.  Grandma kept her values when she moved to the big city of Akron, Ohio and was happy hobos marked her sidewalk during The Great Depression indicating she'd give them something good to eat.

Grandpa thankfully had a solid job, but maybe Grandma could afford to hand out sandwiches because she didn't follow fashions?

"Spiral"

After spending most of two days shoveling snow, I thought it would be a good idea to put that de-icing stuff by my door.  One step outside, and shlumpf!  I was on my ass and banged my head.  Sometimes life isn't kind to me.

Ohio gets snow, sometimes a lot of it, but most of the snow usually falls to the east and/or south of me.  This time, I got all of it.  I shoveled my drive 3x Friday, about 4-6" each time.  By the time my puppy had to do her last night piddle, the snow was so deep she got buried in snow.  She and I agree winter sucks.  Saturday, the snow was deeper than my knee boots are tall.  I repeatedly worked up a sweat while simultaneously freezing.

I stare out the window and type very few words, hypnotized by fat, spiraling snowflakes.  Griping about shoveling is just recreational.  The weather report said I'm not getting a thaw before Monday to erase all this white stuff.  I had to shovel it, and I accepted that.  It's my winter exercise plan.  The sore knot in my shoulder is just a reminder that I'm healthy enough to move mountains, or in this case, create 5' mountains of white matter.

I watched my neighbors handling their snow problems.  A teenaged boy tentatively poked at the stuff and weakly tossed a couple cups worth of snow onto the pile, resting for a few minutes before doing it again.  His dad cleared yards in the time the kid did a foot.  Meanwhile, the woman next to them spent hours with her snow blower.  She was extra considerate and neat.  My crabby neighbor actually joked with me while we shoveled.  A guy drove down the road with a plow, saw me shoveling, and cleared the apron of my drive.  Bless that guy.  I'm not even sure who he is, but he seemed to think my grateful wave of thanks was payment enough for his kindness.

The roads were awful when all this snow was coming down, and I didn't have a choice about being in the mess.  People were understanding and resigned.  Someone got stuck, and a woman jumped out of her car and helped push, leaving her car in the middle of the backed up street.  Nobody honked.  I think we were all glad helping each other still exists.

Lately, I've seen too much in the news about how divided the US is.  I've been appalled at how many people want women barefoot and pregnant and how some people talk so hatefully about women, minorities, and gay people.  Get rid of environmental protections, public school, and overtime pay.  Yet, there are still people willing to help a stranger stuck in snow.  Just as more people voted for Clinton in the election, I have to think that most people are decent and cooperative.

There's something about nature dumping a load of snow to make us stop our usual self-interested vanities and become a community again.  Sitting inside and watching snow spiral down from the sky lowers my blood pressure and gives me a little hope that things have a natural order, that human nature isn't as bad as it seems to be on tv.  Maybe things would be better if Washington, DC got more snow?