Reply #28: I clearly remember three of my great grandmothers.

[hunter]

They were women of the Wild West and tough as nails.

One of my great grandmas lived almost ninety years in a two room log cabin with no plumbing and a wood stove. Her son and daughter-in-law lived nearby in a similar house. They were Idaho ranchers. In the winter their homestead could be snowed in and entirely inaccessible. The last years of her life she moved to town, a place of a couple hundred people, a school, a church and not much else.

As kids my siblings and I thought our great grandmas were mean. What they were was survivors. In their lives if you didn't have a stash of food you'd canned yourself and a pile of wood for the stove you simply died. Some of your kids got sick and died. Some of the women in your family died in childbirth; your sisters, your aunts.

All three of them dismissed much of the modern world as frivolous nonsense.

My great grandma in the log cabin was still resentful that my deceased great grandpa had signed onto rural electrification and bought himself a radio. There was a major family fight when her son & grandson conspired to waste money on an electric water pump. She did not let them run a pipe to the old house. About the same time I asked her what she thought about the moon landing, thinking maybe I'd hear a story about how things had changed in her life and how amazing modern technology was, but she simply snapped at me, telling me it was all an utter waste. I remember feeling quite wounded.

In all three women I see the same dynamic. They all married dreamers, the kinds of guys who messed with telephones, radios, electricity, and engines. It was their sacred duty to keep these guys grounded. The great grandma I never met married a guy who she couldn't keep grounded, and she wrote about her family's frequent miseries. The family bounced around from success to failure, living in mining shacks, to living in large expensive houses, to living in shacks again, as her husbands engineering, inventions and prospecting either succeeded or failed.