RAG BAGS AND POTATO MASHERS

Last week, my husband wanted a cloth to use to polish something. He asked what I had that would do the job, and I joked “I’ll look in the rag bag.”  The rag bag? Well, I really don’t have one. I keep a few odd, old socks for jobs like this, but I don’t have an actual rag bag like my mother’s. It hung just inside the door down to the cellar, and all of us knew where it was when she wanted a rag. In these days of Swiffers, microfiber cloths, and shammys, rag bags are obsolete. Oh, and “shammy” reminds me that there was always a leather chamois, ready to use, by the rag bag.

Rag bags are among the things that have left the building. Taking a mental inventory of my mother’s home, I note the potato ricer and the masher, and the orange juice squeezer and the meat grinder. They can still be found, even purchased brand new, but most gals these days use an electric appliances to do the job. Speaking of electric mixers, who uses an egg beater these days? You can buy them, but unless you’re off the grid why would you want one? Me, if I’m going to beat eggs, I use a whisk.

One of my earliest memories is of my mom using a washboard. I can not, in my wildest dreams, imagine using a washboard on my sheets. Just handling all that wet fabric must have really burned up the calories and built up the arm muscles. I remember her first little washing machine, with its hose hooked up to the kitchen sink. Cute little thing – I remember it as being about the size of a three-drawer file cabinet, with a wringer on top. No more wingers either – progress is wonderful. Until the mid-fifties when we moved to a house that had a washer-dryer, mom always hung the laundry out to dry. I can still remember her wrestling the sheets into the apartment window on a freezing cold day. I don’t need one of those fancy aroma candles because I still have the scent in my head.

What else? My mind is still wandering through the house. A rug beater. Mom would throw the throw rugs over the wash line and bet them dustless. Just thinking about some of the chores she did gives me the groans. According to the time – day, week, month, and on – she had a regular job to do. Every week, I mean every week, she cleaned out the refrigerator. Me, I whisper “clean” into the fridge and call it a day.

You can go online and find all the things that are perhaps not gone for good, but gone from regular use: rotary dial phones, even land lines, clothes pins, coffee percolators, baby carriages, record players, typewriters. I won’t go on.