RIVER CITY JOURNAL: YOU DON'T HAVE TO ANCIENT TO REMEMBER A LOT OF STUFF

To look at me, you wouldn't think I was old enough to remember half the stuff crammed into my brain.

That's what you think, right?

When the snow and ice and freezing rain came this week, I didn't worry about the streets. The city street crew did an amazing job.

And I didn't worry about staying warm. Our house is cozy -- as long as you wear a sweater.

Here's what I worried about as the world around me got white and slippery:

What if the electricity goes off?

We have become incredibly dependent on the invisible juice that zaps along wires in a way I don't even begin to understand.

But if the electricity went off at our house in a blizzard, we'd be Popsicles in short order.

And the TV remote would be a useless hunk of plastic.

And there would be no lights on the Christmas tree.

And we would have frozen pipes and frost-bitten toes and noses.

And we'd have no way to cook.

Not a pretty picture. Particularly that bit about the TV remote.

But, kind and gentle reader, I can remember when we never worried about power outages. I remember the days before electricity.

And you know what? We survived summer heat. We stayed warm when the thermometer dipped really low. We didn't complain about TV reruns.

You know what else? We had Christmas without plugging in anything.

At Shady Nook School, over on Greenwood Valley, Christmas was a grand time of the year. The potbellied stove was loaded with pine slabs. We made miles and miles of construction-paper-and-paste chains to hang everywhere. We cut a cedar tree out in the woods. We used tinsel that was older than most of the students. Remember tinsel?

At home, we had another cedar Christmas tree. We put ornaments and garland and tinsel all over the prickly branches.

Usually by Christmastime the pond behind the barn had frozen over. I didn't know a single person who owned a pair of skates, so we did the Ozark variety of ice skating, which consisted mainly of slipping around on the frozen surface in our rubber galoshes. Remember galoshes? With the metal buckles?

Before electricity, we didn't have light switches or video games or hair blowers or microwaved popcorn or telephones (much less cell phones) or garage-door openers (or garages, for that matter) or dishwashers or steam irons or clothes dryers or e-mail or vacuum cleaners or slow-cooking crockery or toasters or blenders or bread machines or night lights or running water or indoor toilets or showers or motion-detector lights (the one invention God allowed Satan to design) or heating pads or soccer.

So how did we survive? What did we do?

We survived quite well. And we had plenty to do. Even in winter.

We carried wood to the stove. We kept the coal-oil lamps cleaned and filled. We used water and combs to slick down our hair. We popped corn in a skillet on the stove. We went to visit people instead of telephoning or e-mailing. We washed dishes with boiling water from the stove and dried the dishes with towels made from feed sacks. We scraped snow and frost from automobiles while their engines warmed up. We went outside to a cistern or pump for water. We emptied chamber pots (ask your parents or grandparents for complete details). We used flashlights and Coleman lanterns. And we took spit baths (no, it's not what it sounds like).

We talked to each other and played games and read books -- particularly the Bible -- and scoured the Weekly Star Farmer and devoured old magazines and read our Sunday-school lessons and studied our homework and wrote letters (all of mine began the same way: "Dear So-and-so, How are you. I am just fine." -- which left me at a loss about how to fill up the rest of the page) and did chores and played hide-and-seek in the barn.

I remember all of that.

And I'm not at all that old.

Right?