The Other Side of the Hill

As I was standing at my kitchen sink, hand-washing and drying my dishes, I was thinking about my topic for this article. Kaity and I agreed that perhaps changes I have seen in my 84 years might be of interest or amusement to some of you West Salem residents. A sink full of soapy dishwater is one of those changes. I remember, as a teen, standing at the sink washing the dinner dishes with my brother beside me drying. Wonder of all wonders, we had a hand-held sprayer to do the rinsing (and to act as a weapon for my brother when the parents weren’t watching). Do any of you remember having a portable dishwasher that you parked in the kitchen and wheeled to the sink when it was full of dishes to be washed? Of course more modern houses didn’t need the dishwasher on wheels, because the appliance was integrated into the cupboards and countertop.That’s what I had when I last lived in West Salem, along with a stainless steel side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that had an ice maker and a glass top range with a wall mounted combination microwave/venting system above it.  

So why was I washing dishes this morning? When I bought my riverfront property, it came with a house that was built in 1938. Going back to my roots was not a great sacrifice.I traded washing dishes by hand, ice cubes in trays and coil burners on my stove for river access in my back yard. 

I am not old enough to have had to light a fire in the cookstove when I was a kid, but I am old enough to have had a phone that was hung on the wall, had a handheld receiver not attached to the speaker, and a little crank used to ring one of the other parties on the line. Our ring was two longs and a short. That phone got exchanged for a different style  when we moved to the big city of West Salem. Then we got a phone that had an integrated speaker/receiver and a dial and came either wall-mounted or desk style. No more party lines. Long curly cords attached to the hand held the receiver so you had the freedom to walk around while you talked. 

In a mobile society such as ours, it became obvious there was a need to leave messages for folks when they happened to be away from home (or their office). The first message machines were separate attachments, then they got integrated into the phone. Then technological advances disconnected phones from being hardwired and here we are today. The multi-function computers that we all carry around with us and that many have channeled directly into their ears are still called phones. Amazing! 

I mostly don’t drag my feet to avoid change, but I have been a little slow in forming new habits about phones. I frequently don’t know where mine is. It is often buried in my purse and I don’t hear it ring or signal a text. I still think that phones are for calling people to have a conversation. Weird, huh? 

It is nice to be able to see who is calling. Of course that works well only if you keep your contact list up to date. Do you remember when you used to need to keep a notebook that had the phone numbers for your contacts? And you even memorized the numbers of your frequently called people. And there were phone books you could use to look up phone numbers (which you could also use for kids to sit on for added height at the dinner table). Now it’s all there on your phone.  Very convenient — as long as you don’t lose your phone. That wasn’t an issue when it was mounted on your wall.