Pondering used to be a pretty common thing. When I walked at night my mind traveled far and wide. People used to spend a lot of time doing things that left their minds free while they were physically active. There were no little devices that you could stick in your ear to entertain you. People used to get together and just talk.
When I was little there was a gathering at my house in the front yard nearly every evening in the spring-summer and fall. My mom would lay out a quilt or blanket on the ground in the shade and bring out coffee. The neighbors would come with their kids and we would play while they visited. This was just something that people did then. the house was hot after the cooking and once supper was eaten and the dishes put in the sink to soak you got out and let the house cool off. When there were no airconditioning people spent a lot of their evenings on porches or in the yard. this is where people made their neighbors into friends and eventually almost like family.
People were just more "thoughtful" back then because they had so much more time to think and so few distractions. Even the TV wasn't all that much. For most of my childhood, we only had one channel eventually there were three but even with that, we didn't watch a lot of TV. Other than football and the Wonderful World of Disney Tv was what you did when there wasn't anything else to do like when it rained or was cold outside.
The women were the hearts of the home and the neighborhood. They sort of raised us, kids, communally. When we were out and about whichever Mom was near was THE Mama. They got together every day and worked out how to get the school kids to school and swapped watching the little guys out so they could go shopping without packing up the hoard. People had more kids back then and 4 was normal but some just kept going. We had one family that had 15 kids. They eventually bought the house next door. Can you IMAGINE 6 or 7 people in a three-bedroom house with ONE bathroom?? That was just life back then.
On Thursday our house became the neighborhood beauty shop. I got up and got out early on that day in the summer. The smell of that stuff that they used doing those permanents was BAD. All of this made our neighborhood into a sort of clan. As times changed I remember when the women started going to work. It was shocking at first when Earnest one of or neighbors "LET" Anna take a job. Back then when a woman worked it was sort of seen as shameful and indicated that the man couldn't adequately support his family. Eventually, most of the ladies went to work. Times change.
I know that women's lib has been good for women and improved their lot in life in a lot of ways but I can't help but mourn what was lost. Those women were the homemakers. They were what turned the HOUSE from a place where you slept into a HOME. They were the heart of the family and were the single greatest influence of the personality that the children would grow into. Freedom always has a cost. I fear sometimes that the cost here has been the loss of our soul as a people. Kids are not really raised these days. In all too many cases, they are just warehoused in daycare until they are old enough to send out into the world.
Eventually, I hope that we will restructure. The freedom that the women got with women's lib will in the end also free up the men. I love babies and kids. When my daughter had my Granddaughter they needed her to go back to work after the 6 weeks maternity leave. I got to do something that I had always thought that I would enjoy. I owned my own business and so could do as I wished. I sifted my work to evenings and weekends for one of the best years of my life I said home and took care of my baby. It was a wonderful experience.
They moved in next door to us before the baby was born. That Baby, now 9 buns back and forth between the two houses and pretty much runs things. LOL. She has had the kind of family and care that is not common now. With 4 people giving her the attention that she needs she has flowered into a real person at a young age. She never knows who is going to pick her up from school. We all do it. We spend a lot of time together out in the yard and try to eat on the porch together once or twice a week. Now that she has retired and only works one day week my wife often cooks for both houses. We have friends over a lot and she has a huge extended family of friends Aunts and Uncles that all care for her.
Sometimes the old ways are still the best.