POOCH SAYS

      I wouldn't trade the conveniences of today for all the tea in China. Memory is supposed to soften the rough edges of long ago; I can look back with nostalgia and smile but I hated some parts of growing up.

      Sunday dinner always started with a trip to Aunt Nell and Uncle August's farm on a Saturday. (Oh, how I hated that outhouse!) The trip home was accompanied by the periodic thumbing of a live chicken in a gunny sack in the trunk of the car.

      On Sunday, my mother would grab that old hen and give it a few circular swings and off would come its head. I detested seeing that bird flopping in the back yard almost as much as I disliked the smell as she singed off the pin feathers at the gas stove.

      In early Sunday evenings, my job was to shave a bar of Fels Naptha and a bar of Ivory soap into boiling water in the copper wash boiler because clothes had soak overnight so they could be washed on Monday morning! Remember that long stirring stick?

      I never got to feed the clothes through the wringer and into the rinse tub . I was too young for it to matter, but I'd overheard urban rumors about such-and-such who caught her you-know-whats in the ringer.

      Remember Sunday School? I was given a dime tied in a knot in the corner of a hankie for the collection plate and firmly admonished NOT to chew on it because wet knots were almost impossible to untie. As I advanced in years I had a Sunday School teacher who chewed Sen-Sens. Heavens, do you supposed he was a SMOKER?

      Before I reached the advanced age of ten, I do not recall a single automobile trip of more than ten or fifteen miles when we did not have a flat tire! My father never seemed too surprised!

      Puberty arrived at the time I was allowed to go to the dime store and squander my allowance. A girl just had to have a tube of Tangee lipstick. It went on orange and was supposed to change into a nice shade. I doubt that it really did, but weren't we grown up?

      We girls were threatened with our lives if we shaved our legs because the hair would grow in darker and heavier! (But we did it anyway and I don't think it made a tad of difference!)

      I remember food and gas rationing, a bucket of sand by the front door, and blackout curtains. I suppose the powers- that- be were convinced that the Germans or the Japanese were going to fly half-way across the continent to drop their bombs!

      I recall Sunday evenings when we'd gather in front of the radio and actually LOOK at the little yellowish dial as we listened to Fibber McGee and Molly and the Jack Benny Show with the long-suffering "Rochester!!!"

      Will current youngsters remember their first computer, solar-powered calculator, Ipod, cell phone, DVD player, microwave, garage door opener, and refrigerator with ice through the door as fondly as we can remember having to give the telephone operator a number (and being able to eavesdrop on party lines), a typewriter that periodically had to have the ribbon changed, putting up the sign for the ice man to deliver, and bringing in the milk from the doorstep in the winter before it had time to freeze?

      Come on, readers! How about sending in your favorite memories? Let's travel down Memory Lane together.