The stories I'm collecting are set in a time without cars, jet airplanes, odwalla bars or lazy quests for a wifi signal. They feature horses and mules and trolley cars, hand-plucked chickens and penny candy, hand-written letters and congratulatory telegraphs. All of this seems wonderfully romantic. I have to stop and forcibly remind myself that this was not a misty-edged technicolor past of soft sighs and swelling piano music; it was all probably rather awful.
To make things harder, everyone keeps insisting that I'm wrong. Things weren't terrible at all. "I don't remember it being cold," says a relative who grew up in a land where winters were thirty below. "We had to scrape together pennies to survive, but you know, we all worked together," says another, wistfully. "It was a hard life, but it was a good life," says just about everybody - and that, in itself, sounds so romantic, with its promise of hard-earned exhaustion and quiet satisfaction, that once again I have to fight to quell a surge of absurd nostalgia.
Outhouses, I tell myself. Droughts. Milking cows at 5 a.m. Laundry taking all day. What's so great about riding behind a team of mules?
(wistful sigh...)
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