My grandmother died in 1992, just as I was purchasing a beat up, two-family house, one town over from where she had lived. Growing up I was close to my grandparents, especially my paternal grandparents. For most of my youth they lived a mile down the road. My grandfather was always ready to help with whatever we grandkids were doing. In the summertime we painted houses, cleaned gutters, mowed lawns…all kinds of odd jobs, and my grandfather was right there, ready to jump in. He predeceased my grandmother by at least ten years.

When I was purchasing that first house, it was in rough shape and I needed everything. As my father and uncle worked their way through grandma’s household items, they made a pile for me. Plates, flatware, coat hangers and old electric laundry dryer…all kinds of stuff, including, clothes pins. They came in a Ball canning jar and a cloth bag. That bag was tattered and torn and re-sewn many times.

With the exception of a few plastic ones, all the clothes pins were the wooden type, with the center steel spring. I didn’t realize how good they were (and unparalleled at holding clothes on the line) until I purchased my first pack of new, grocery-store-bought clothes pins to have some extras. All of a sudden grandma’s pins seemed solid, thick and strong. The springs could hold a damp towel on the line in a stiff breeze. The “new” clothes pins, not so much.

I’d always had an affinity for old stuff, even as a kid. I loved holding my maternal grandfather’s carpentry tools. Though I wouldn’t reach for his wooden plane or hand saws too often for actual work, I loved that I had some of them nearby, overseeing what I was doing. It was almost like they spoke to me, telling me the right way to deal with that compound angle or mortise or hinge. And the same was true of those clothes pins. The difference was that though those clothes pins were antiques, they are just as good, or better, than the new version. And they spoke to me too. “Hey, just put an extra pin on that sheet, would you?!”

Even the smallest object could tell a story.

The Old & the New
& Staying Flexible

It seems advances in technology and its applications in day-to-day life are being reworked and upgraded with increasing speed and without warning. This becomes acutely evident when I traveled outside of New England – a fairly rare occurrence.

Learning to use a computer, a cell phone – piece of cake. Now it seems you need an app for nearly everything; getting boarding passes for the airline, getting a ride from point A to point B, or paying for a parking spot.

Tasks I assume simple and straightforward now require a smart phone and either cell a signal or high-speed internet service. A radio in a rental car shouldn’t be too hard to navigate, but the “old world” operator inputs are so different, it is hard to know where to even start.

Some of this could be explained by the transition to the internet-based economy that started close to twenty years ago and has really taken off in the last ten years.

Most people (especially those under fifty) are able to meet a majority of their social and material needs through Amazon, Spotify, Facebook and Twitter – nearly instant gratification with just a few clicks. I was recently at a small local store that lost its internet access and pretty much put a stop to all transactions.

Navigating between the old pre-internet world and the current internet world is challenging. A handful a years ago, there was a big fight between John Deere and John Deere farmers that wanted to repair their own tractors, but needed proprietary software to even get started.

Just recently, Apple started offering a suitcase of tools for repairing your own iPhone. A great idea in theory, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

You could rent the tools, but if you don’t return them, they charge your credit card $1500. But the real kicker is even with the specialized tools, most of the repairs are hours long and remain very challenging.

Recently, Canadian N-News subscriber Bob Paterson (see his letter on page 12 and his photos on the back cover) wrote in with a comment. Our ongoing email conversation about tractors, motorcycles, local papers and the dichotomy of “the old” and “the new” spurred Bob to write about a farm supply store that had a parking lot with Tesla charging stations on one side and sheds for horse and buggies on the other. (There is a significant Mennonite community in the area.)

That made me think about the intense flexibility we all need these days to continue to balance the apps and the horse and buggies.