Lost crafts

I can distinctly remember reading the feminist classic The Women's Room by Marilyn French just after college, and really appreciating for the first time just how hard women's work was prior to the era of modern conveniences and broadened professional horizons. All that time cooking from scratch! and canning! and good heavens, the effort required to launder anything.

This last point has been reinforced every time I watch one of those PBS-style reality television shows, where families have to live in the Victorian or Pilgrim or Pioneer eras for a month, or whatever. The men get to build stuff, and at the end of the show they're all, "This was the most fulfilling experience of my life! I totally found myself!" But the women? Every day they wake up at dawn, cook, clean, labor, churn butter, cook, clean, make cheese, cook clean, sew, drop exhausted into bed - and wake up the next day to start the whole cycle over again, relentlessly. And the worst, absolute worst days, are laundry days. By the end of the show the women are all, "Get me home to my washing machine or I'm going to fricking kill somebody."

So I grew up in the era of convenience, and I appreciate how much these things made the lives of my mother and grandmother, and me, easier. Yet here we are as a society, confronted with the unintended consequences of some of those conveniences - they consume too much oil, they produce too much waste, the resulting eating habits cause too much diabetes and obesity.

Which is ok, because I believe we can find a new balance, with all that we've learned along the way. But as we've tried to make adjustments, I'm struck by just how many skills and crafts have become rare or even extinct.

For example, we've long had a manual push-mower for our little tiny yard, and it was amazingly hard to find somebody who could sharpen the blades. "Oh, that's a real skill," said the woman at one mower repair shop. "My dad tried to teach me, and I never got the hang of it. We had one guy who could do it, but he died. There's another guy across town, you should go there." So we did - he was old, too - and the mower came back better than new. Snicker-snack! went the blades. "That," said Enrico, "was $50 well spent."

Another example - I am thinking of doing some canning this summer, due to the local food experiment and the price of food. I would love to have some Washington cherries year-round. I have jars, purchased over a decade ago when we were poor and energetic, and canning from our garden seemed like a good idea. But I need new lids (you have to replace those every time). I tried three grocery stores, two drug stores and a hardware store - none of them sell canning supplies. It's like the art of canning has just disappeared.

I find this again and again. A clothes-drying rack and clothespins. Replacing the ripped canvas on our deck chairs - who does that? The metal frames are just fine, no need to send them to the dump. Why don't more of the local dairies go back to re-usable glass bottles with a deposit? I'd do that. I'm glad I kept my vintage edition of Joy of Cooking, because it explains basic things about food preparation that the newer cookbooks don't bother with any more. Even getting my clarinet refurbished, I learned that the last of the apprentice programs for this skilled trade was shuttered years ago, and now very few people really know how to do it well. Instead there are quickie community-college courses that barely scratch the surface of the art.

So perhaps there are a host of new, old careers and trades that will open up again as a result of our forced simplification. Maybe this is a good thing - maybe there are people out there who would much rather master the art of tool-sharpening or musical instrument repair than sit in front of a computer all day. Just like artisan bread-baking has come back, and quilting. Maybe we'll end up with a world that's both more sustainable, and more interesting to live in.