Recently I read that the baby boomer generation is the last connection to a generation of people who lived a more simple life with very little technology.

Somedays I wonder how we could function without all of our technology. Some days I wish we could go back to those simple times, but could we keep the washer and dryer?

Recently my mother gave to me my grandmother’s scrub board. She was born in 1908, married in 1925 and probably purchased the scrub board that year. Or maybe it was a shower gift! Can you imagine spending an entire day–beginning at daylight–hand washing all of your laundry?

Then you had to hang them on the clothes line to dry, praying it didn’t rain. Thank goodness most women did not work outside the home then–or they would have spent an entire day off killing themselves just doing the laundry.

My mother and her sisters have told me countless stories of the chores they had to do, as well as some of the inventive ways they tried to improve their looks. Coming from a rural farming community, they had very little extra money for unnecessary beauty aids. We now have curling irons that they would have been very envious of at the time.

One humorous story was a bright idea my mother had to curl her younger sister’s hair. She took a wire coat hanger apart and heated it in their fireplace. She then took a long section of hair and proceeded to wrap it up to form a curl. When the hot metal met my aunt’s hair, it burned right through it. She screamed, “You burnt my hair!” No one thought to try and cut the rest of her hair to even it up. I still have a school picture of my aunt with the lopsided hair when she was nine years old. My mother was the older and wiser teenage sister.

Needless to say, we could all learn a lesson from those times. We now have more conveniences than any other time in history and yet we seem to have less free time than any other time in history. What does that tell us? That we are never satisfied and that we are always trying to fill our lives with things we don’t really need. Personally I would like to go back to simpler times. Times that my parents and grandparents had. Working full time outside the home and trying to run a household is not an easy task.

Do any of you feel the same way? Would you like to forfeit some of the conveniences to be able to be a stay at home wife/mother and live a less hectic life?