I Was Thinking... How Did I Survive?

For my wife’s birthday, we had our whole family together. Both of our daughters and our son-in-law cooked and cleaned in the kitchen. However, their idea of cleanliness exceeded my expectations.
When I tried to help by wiping off the counter with a dish rag, my oldest daughter told me I couldn’t use that one because it had been used to wipe off the cutting board that had had raw chicken on it. She then proceeded to use sanitary wipes to clean the counter. With my inept ability concerning cleanliness, it is amazing I’ve survived as long as I have.
I grew up on a farm. The level of sanitation I was accustomed to was a far cry from the germ free, purified, and sanitized standards of today. The milk I drank came right from the barn with no pasteurization. Our water was never from bottles or went through a purifier. It came from a well with whatever minerals were in the ground. I drank from the kitchen faucet, sometimes from a garden hose, and also used the tin cup that hung on the nail near the stock tank.
I don’t think any of the kids that attended our one room school had any food allergies. We all brought our lunch to school in a lunch pail or a brown paper bag. Even if our sandwich was egg salad, ground ham spread, or bologna and cheese, they all sat on the same shelf in the coat room on a shelf without any refrigeration and I don’t believe anyone ever got sick from salmonella.
In the fall and spring, many of us road our bikes down country roads without helmets. In the winter, we brought sleds with steel runners to school and many times skated on a creek.
The only playground equipment we had were six swings anchored in concrete with no wood chips or rubberized mats below them. Almost every boy third grade and above had a pocketknife which was useful for cutting switches off trees to use as swords during recess. They also were useful for pealing green apples we picked off trees on the way to or from school.
Most farm families raised much of their own food. Everyone had a garden and the only food processing we knew about was when mom canned.
We all helped pick strawberries, blueberries, raspberries or whatever you grew, and many were eaten before they got to the house without anyone thinking about washing them. Our eggs were fresh and many times there was a bowl of hard-boiled eggs in the center of the table for days. We knew where the chicken we ate came from, and probably helped to either butcher or process them. For most of us, beef and pork did not come from the store either.
If you grew up on a working farm, you probably became immune to many things that cause irritations to many today. We were exposed to hay dust, oats dust, and animal dander from cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs. Inevitably you also stepped in some type of manure.
But after you finished your chores, your mother made sure you “washed up” before you sat down to eat. There was no such thing as a daily shower, but we did get a bath every Saturday night, if we felt we needed it or not.
Child labor laws never really applied to farms. Everyone had a job as soon as they were old enough to do something. Children could feed chickens, gather eggs, and feed calves. As you got older your responsibilities grew as well.
Most farm kids were driving farm machinery well before they obtained their driver’s license. We could drive tractors and knew how to shift and let out a clutch, so it didn’t stall. We learned to run balers, combines, and choppers and knew what had to be oiled and greased before we started.
However, accidents did happen. People got kicked by a cow or stepped on. You got scratched up when baling hay, got cut by a barbed wire fence, and probably stopped on a rusty nail more than once. Sometimes serious things occurred too, but that was just a risk of farming.
While it’s amazing I survived; I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
Did You Ever Wonder? — Are eggs a liquid or a solid?