History is ripe with stories of families that didn't approve of prospective betrothals. My grandparents on my mothers side have a pretty great track record of hating everyone that was introduced to the family and even chased a few of them off, some permanently.....like back to their homeland....in Italy, never to be seen or heard from again.
I knew when it was my time to announce my engagement to my now husband, that more than likely, it wouldn't be all hearts and flowers. I prepared him for the worst, but folks who haven't grown up in a family like ours, you know the kind of family that introduced the concept,"Tough Love" and never got credit for it, have a hard time believing that some grandma's would rather kick you in the gut with words in the name of love than make you cookies sometimes.
We both went to visit my grandparents K. to deliver the good news...my soon to be husband was all giddy with excitement, poor lamb, and me, I'd sooner chew glass but I knew if word got back to them about the pending nuptuals from some other family member before I got to them....I would be ordering my own death sentence.
I did my best to ease Grandma K. in...she was never big on weddings, hard to believe she had one of her own, since in her view they were a waste of money and pointless too when the world has been heading to hell in a hand basket since.....well, since time began...but its getting even worse....every damn day. With Andrew sitting next to me, eagerly holding my hand to assure me that I was worried for no reason, I filled her in, letting her know that he had asked and I had accepted.
Her first words were, "Why would you marry him? He doesn't have a pot to piss in!!". Frankly, I was relieved....this was going well, Andrew was somewhat aghast. At least my grandparents were open to the possibility of my marrying someone....hell, they even wanted me to marry someone with a few bucks in the bank.
She was right, he didn't have a pot to piss in, but he loved me and really, when you are young and in love, you very rarely think about retirement funds and stock options. They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery.....if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor". But worse than that there were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot.....they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.
Which brings me to some neat information that I came across while surfing the facebook status' of my friends. We recently entered our home in the Home Sweeter Home contest from Ramar and having read many of the stories from other participants, its hard not to be grateful that the only thing we are struggling with is our broken dream home and not sick kids, injuries that affect our ability to work or life threatening illnesses.
How bad it is, is really a matter of perspective and sometimes its good to find ways to remind yourself of that, when quotes start rolling in for your furnace to the tune of $10,000 and you have just lived 7 months on Austerity Measures to squeeze out $7000 worth of breathing room on your line of credit. Yippee, along comes another 10 months of creative meals with tinned beans, self inflicted spa days, free movies that skip from the library and cheap rough toilet paper to add on to our 2.5 years of budget living!! So to prevent my early retirement of jumping of a bridge, I thought I would remind myself of why it isn't THAT BAD.
Here are some interesting facts about what it was like to live in the 1500s:-
"Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. However, since they were starting to smell . ..... . brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor."
The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire... Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat".
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust."
These could be old wives tales but its hard to believe that they don't have some ring of truth to them. I recently went home to Ontario for my Grandmother P's (on my fathers side) funeral and visiting her home, the same home that my Grandparents P. moved into in their 20's and where she lived until her 90's brings into sharp focus a whole lot of whining on my part to the point that I should feel deeply embarrassed for complaining at all.
My Grandmother P.'s first and only home is less than 800 square feet, part of a community of "war-time" homes that were made by the government for veterans that were returning from war. They were meant to be torn down and viewed as temporary housing. In my fathers family home, Grandma P. raised four children and provided a home for her unmarried brother, a cat and a dog named Rags.
At Christmas time and for many family gatherings, we could pack in as many as 25 people and counting. In order to accommodate all of us, the kitchen table was dragged into the living room and spanned from wall to wall, using every fixture imaginable that could be use as some form of seat to get us all round the dinner table. I remember crawling underneath the table as a child just to get to the only bathroom since with that many relatives packed in and furniture filling up every space, there was really no other way, short of peeing in Grandma's gardenias in the back garden.
My father, the third boy of the bunch, never had his own bed or even his own bedroom until after he married and then moved out with my mother at the age of 19. Imagine what my Grandmother K. thought of what he had to offer my mother....let's just say that she wasn't too thrilled with my Dad from the beginning. My Dad actually still gets a kick out of story he shared with me many times about how they once got into an argument and Grandma K. told him that she hated him before she ever met him.
My Grandparents only home resides in a place called Eagle Place in Ontario. If you want to know what kind of neighborhood my family grew up and still resides in...read some of these lovely articles below like....
Officers prowl around and find grow-op http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/2007/10/13/officers-prowl-brantford-at-night-scouring-fields-outside-city-yields-outdoor-grow-op or
Eagle Place Residents stand up for themselves against crime http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/2009/11/26/eagle-place-residents-stand-up-for-themselves or
Shots Fired in Eagle Place http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/2008/09/03/shots-fired-in-eagle-place.
My Grandfather has had to replace the front fence twice from drunk guys driving through it into his front lawn. Once is unusual.....twice, well you would think that my family would want to move at some point.
Raising my kids in Waverley, Nova Scotia the local crime report consists of kids breaking into cars that are left open......and then going joy riding because car owners in our neck of the woods also like to leave their keys in their open cars. More than 3/4's of our neighborhood still leaves their front doors unlocked. I'm even guilty of leaving my keys in my front door....till the following morning, more than once.
My Dad is paranoid about locking stuff...he freaks out when we leave the kids bikes in the driveway to go into the house for a drink of water. I know why too....growing up in Eagle Place, kids in their neighborhood couldn't even afford to buy a Pepsi. Anything that they wanted and couldn't afford was stolen. My Dad's surrogate family down the street was the Gambles. They had the biggest wartime house, the only one with a coveted second floor. Not that they had much more room at their house since they also had ten children.
After the funeral, we took a little tour around the hood and Dad shared with me stories of how much stuff is buried on the bottom of the Grand River...mostly cases of Pepsi. With the Pepsi factory being uptown on the river, Dad and the Gamble boys used to steal a boat and sneak their way up to the factory to steal cases of Pepsi that were being loaded on trucks for delivery. Using the river for a quick getaway, they would row back to Eagle Place and stash the goods...many times they had to dump the cases overboard as the cops chased them down river.
Mrs. Gamble always covered for them, telling the cops the kids had been in the backyard all afternoon. Since she couldn't afford to buy the Pepsi for her family, she supported her children's resourcefulness.
Somehow in my moaning I've forgotten where my family came from. I may not have grown up like my father...but his life is just a stone's throw from my own. Our home is three times the size of my Grandmother P's home and we have significantly more stuff in it. Every child has their own bedroom. We have a dining room table that seats eight and it's in a dining room. No one has driven onto our lawn in a drunken stupor yet. My kids have no idea what it is like to have to steal and they certainly couldn't even imagine what it would be like for us not to afford a Pepsi. We may be on a tight budget, but we still have money in the Peanut Butter jar, if we need it.
It's good to be reminded of the things that really matter. Many friends and family have asked me if we think we could win the Ramar contest and more than likely, we won't. There are so many families out there struggling more than us. Somehow the universe likes to give me a kick in the butt as a reminder of that, which most days I appreciate. Some family is going to get a break through the Ramar contest and more than likely, it will be the one that really needs it. That's a wonderful thing even if it isn't our family.
We are your average Canadian family and we have more than what we need including a pot that we could piss in, if we really wanted to....
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