125 HUMOROUS INCIDENTS IN PIONEER LIFE IN UTAH Morgan, Utah. Nov. 13, 1940 REMINISCENCE By Eliza Dickson Rich "Backward turn backward oh time in your flight. Make me a child again just for tonight." "Memory, Memory hast thou aught more charming, more delightful locked up in the treasure house of things that were? Member when we rode in a wagon with a high spring seat and how we put several seats in when all the family went in the canyons, put a double bed with four spring seats and spread our lunch on the ground. Member how we used to celebrate the 24th of July in the grove with big swings, everyone ran races for a sack of candy; as spread dinner for everyone with 40 gallon barrel of lemonade with a tin cup tied to the barrel, help yourself. Member how we used to white wash our walls in the spring and later years paper them with bright colored paper with big red roses for a border and put bright new rag carpet on the floors and streached it tight with a carpet stretcher with a lot of straw under them so the table legs would sink way down, when we took them up, oh, the dust. Member how we filled our bed ticks with fresh new straw they would be so high we had to get on a chair to climb on. How we laughed when we found ourselves on one side next morning or piled up in the middle. Member how we swept our door yards and sprinkled them to make them hard and scrubbed the board walk till it was as clean as a new pin. Remember our flower gardens of smellage old man, ribbon grass, rattle snake grass, sweet Williams, bergamot and minnuette. Remember how we went current picking, dried them, how we strung apples on a string and hung them to dry. How we set milk in bright tin pans, rows and rows on shelves on the pantry shelves or cellar, how we'd skim the cream in a cream jar, and then when it was sour put it in the old wooden churn and churn up and down up and down till we had nice yellow butter; how mother would print it in a round print with a flower on it and what we didn't need for ourselves would take to the store and get groceries with it. 126 How good it tasted fresh from the churn and on corn bread and soda biscuts and the buttermilk for the men. Member every night we shined up the lamp chimney on the old coaloil lamp and cut the wick for a bright light. Remember how pa would take us all to grandma or aunts or the neighbors to stay all night and the older ones looked wise and whispered to one another "Ma's going to have a baby," after how it came was dressed in a shirt, band, diddy, pinning flannel and night gown and then wrapped in a blanket, with just it's nose sticking out, how when it went out it had long dresses with rows and rows of tucks and insertion with ruffles on the bottom; long embroidery petti¬coat and a flannel one with pinning flannel under that and when it was three months or so old, it was shortened and a whole new layette of short cloths made for it. How it used to sleep with mother and dad and mother nursed it till it was one and a half or two years and then she would ween it and get another. Remember how we gathered catnip, yarrow, spearmint and tie them in bunches for winter use and when we were sick mother would steep them and soak our feet and give the baby catnip tea for stomach ache. Remember how we used to carry water from the well or spring, how we would be all day washing and sometimes was the colored next day, How we'd get up and start ironing, oh so early and iron with irons heated on a hot stove ruffled dresses and petticoats all starched as stiff as could be. And the parlors they were never used except for company, with the walls covered with enlarged pictures of the ancestors. And those who could afford it, had an organ and a secretary with scarfs on the pictures and chair backs. But now everything has changed. We ride in a nice upholstered automobile sixty or seventy miles an hour. Walk on velvet carpets, sleep on spring filled mattresses, with wool blankets soft as down. Our door yards are bright green lawns with flowers everywhere. Hot and cold running water in the houses, wash with electricity with electric everything, stoves, 127 refrigerators, irons, waffle irons, toasters, electric lights with pretty shades. Babys all come in the hospital now, and don't wear scarcely anything, most of them eat from a bottle with their feedings of vegetables, and cod liver oil, orange juice and cereal. They sleep in their own little white bed with pink and blue blankets and quilts. Their mothers wear silk undies, silk dresses, silk stockings and pretty shoes. Their soft curls shine like silk and smell like roses and violets. If Grandma should come back now she wouldn't recognize her old home. There would be a bath room where the old stair was, cloth closets over the cellar steps, a white sink where the old water bench stood. A cabinet where the cupboard once was and where that little window, french doors and a beauti¬ful arch between the dining room and what was once the parlor, but now a living room where all the family come and go at will. May be you won't believe it but Morgan is the richest town in the west. Every housewife cleans with gold dust, every cloud has a silver lining, every blade of grass has a green back, every bird has a bill and every bill we put in our pockets is doubled.