A regular customer came in yesterday. He told me when he was first married gasoline cost $.29 a gallon and his monthly income fell somewhere around $250 a month.
It’s no secret how I feel about those times, how I wish we could take a sliver of that simplicity, hard work, and American-made wares and plug it into The Present. I have a personal tradition I try to keep up each week to keep me in touch with those days -I stay up (if I can) after everyone is asleep on Sunday night and watch a ridiculous old movie. There’s a VAST difference between awesome old movies and ridiculous old movies.
This Sunday’s edition was Diary of a Teenage Bride. I knew it was going to be good from the get-go.
I try to keep it simple at our house, try to dial out things that don’t matter and soak up things that do so my family will have an honest-to-goodness juicy life.
But it is SO hard. I find that after school, after homework, after teaching piano lessons, after Alice has thrashed the entire house from my bathroom to the counters of the kitchen, I’m doing good to curl up under a blanket and let my brain ride on auto pilot while I watch old movies about teenage brides. Truth: sometimes I run out of steam before the kids’ get to bed, and WE ALL curl up and watch movies.
I’m fighting a losing battle though. Society seems against me. Simplicity is a lost art.
Proof -Lacy brought this home from school yesterday (she’s 7).
“I don’t know these words, Mom. I just copy…”
I try to balance out the craziness of the outside world INSIDE my home. I encourage Lacy to help me decorate the house with seasonal nature. She brought me a big bundle of the tassles from our dried out corn stalks. We put them in a basket and Alice is having a Tassle-Day (as opposed to Hay-Day because my puns are a little sad on a Tuesday):
Sometimes amidst all the business and the craziness of the outside world, it’s nice to have a few HOME things that help you feel centered. Dinner in a pumpkin is something that our entire family loves, and we make it every year. This year I made a few changes to make it gluten-free, and it was still hearty, delicious, and HOME.
We ate out of a pumpkin and then carved:
And I made an executive decision in the Name of Simplicity that next year there will BE NO PATTERNS. We’re going back to the old days of creative thinking… the days where Mom doesn’t end up doing 75% of the work.
And to round this post out like a pumpkin, we’ll bring back old movies for 200, Alex.
Halloween is also the night I revive a personal tradition of watching a ridiculous old movie. I’m hoping someday someone (anyone) I live with will latch onto my love of ridiculous old movies.
Here’s this year’s choices:
And if all else fails, there’s always Arsenic and Old Lace. I hope your Halloween finds you rejecting the busy and embracing the simple… and maybe, just maybe, it will find you on the couch with a movie about a woman who morphs into a gigantic fly and terrorizes EVER.EE.ONE.
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