Off the Publisher’s Desk 11-6-2024

Fall into winter!

As I was raking up leaves recently at my home and shoving them into a plastic bag, I began to thing about how did we handle leaves when I was young? We did not have plastic bags or any other bag nor any compost area, except maybe the garden to dispose of all those leaves.

My parents’ home had more than 20 trees and that was a lot of leaves and I remember on some occasions the wind might blow those leaves into the neighbors’ yard. We did not have a rotary lawn mower to grind up those leaves, so what we did was rake them up and take them to a spot near the alley and set them afire. But, with a number of property owners burning leaves, that made a lot of smoke, but we lived with it.

What also needed to be done in the fall to get ready for winter was to bring the snow shovels out of storage. The folks’ home was on the corner and had a sidewalk 125 feet long on one side and 150 feet long on the other side and we had no snow blower and I think I wore out a shovel every winter on that walk.

Of course the biggest single item that had to be done before cold weather set in was all the screens had to be removed from the house windows and replaced by storm windows.

Back then some of the people that I knew had wood as the main source of heat and a supply of cordwood was racked outside and stored in the basement. We had a coal fired furnace that needed attention every several hours and then the coal room in the basement had to be filled with several tons of coal, which would last for a couple of months. When that was almost gone, a local firm would back a truck across the snow-covered lawn so more coal could delivered into the coal room. With a number of heating systems using coal, we had more smoke to contend with.

As time passed so did technology and then we had an automatic furnace that used oil to heat, then L.P. gas and then natural gas, and some have turned to the electric heating to warm heir home. But some people have returned to using wood to aid in home heating. 

That brings me to what is our way of life as the temperature drops and the days get shorter, just turn up the thermostat and cover up with a blanket in front of the TV. We just turned our clock back last Saturday as daylight savings came to an end and it’s dark by six. There is a drive afloat to do away with daylight saving, but I like it.

Then we look forward to deer hunting and then it is Thanksgiving and on to Christmas. Christmas eve is the big family gathering at our home and has been for more than fifty years.

This year we will be welcoming a new member to the family as Teddy DeWitt, of the Ohio clan of the family arrived, on November 2, weighing in at six pounds, three ounces. Congratulations to parents Austin and Maddy.

Thanks for reading!     ~Carlton