REMEMBERING HARD TIMES

And now we’ve had a death in our community, and someone in a retirement center is infected. Son Clint, who continues to work at the paper mill, called last evening to say we shouldn’t see each other for a while. We agreed. The Boise son, also working every day, said that one of those big digital reader boards over the freeway says, “Stay home!”

I’ve always felt that good things happen when a community comes together to make the best of hard times. The present circumstances hurt in more ways than one, but we have to make the best of it, regardless of what it means for us personally.  

“If I had acted like that,” I commented to Mike, “my mother would have had plenty to say.”

“You mean, ‘suck it up,’” laughed Mike.

“Yes, but it would have taken her ten minutes to say it.”

As a society, we’ve come a long way from hardship. I was born after WWII, but my parents shared with me their memories of hard times – how during WWI women were encourage to knit for the servicemen during church, how the community worked together to provide food to the quarantined during the flu epidemic of 1918, what it meant not to have the price of a postage stamp during the Great Depression, and how food, shoes, tires, and gasoline were rationed during WWII. As people pass, these things slip from collective memory.

I remember so well sitting at the supper table one night, when somehow the subject of WWI came up. Mother said that as the young men left for war, the community would meet at the park for a farewell picnic. I was struck by the finality of that.

“You didn’t know if you’d ever see that person again,” I said.

“You figured not,” Mother said in a flat tone.

She went on to say that they didn’t get much news about the war, but everyone knew that when “Tom” came home, he would tell them all about it. Tom was the kind that never quit talking, she said. Tom came home all right, but he was so traumatized (what they called “shell shocked”) that he couldn’t talk. He never talked again. She was perhaps ten years old at that time, but I could see she was as affected by that change in Tom as if he hadn’t come home at all.

Hard times bring difficulties, the least of which is personal inconvenience. The pandemic won’t leave the world where it found it. History tells us we will suffer some losses, but man will survive. KW