When Wisdom Sat Next Door

Sometimes while I’m standing at my kitchen sink, mechanically washing my dishes, my hands soaking in the warmth of the wash water, my thoughts drift back to the 1970s — not to my own life exactly, but to the people around me who quietly shaped it.

They were older then. Neighbors. Friends and acquaintances of my mother’s. Women in house dresses and men in white t-shirts and suspenders, who had begun their lives in gentler times. People whose lives had begun in the early 1900s — a time when slowness wasn’t a rebellion but the rhythm of everyday life. Life was based on traditions handed down and “knowings” that were seldom replaced by “better and new” but rather, just simply improved from one generation to the next.

To me, as a child, their ways seemed inconvenient. Outdated. Almost amusing.

Their furniture was “ancient” to my young eyes. Upholstered in patterns, often having belonged to their parents or even grandparents — a dresser, a dining room table, a china cupboard. There was no end to the generations that the furniture had passed through. These were things that my childish eyes of the 1970s didn’t recognize, with doilies tucked under every dish. They dried their clothes on lines, not because they were romantic — but because that’s just what you did. They saved rainwater at the downspouts to wash their hair once a week. They saved the bacon grease. They made coffee in percolators and served it in cups on saucers, with quiet voices and no rush to go anywhere at all.

And I, like so many children of the modern age, was being raised by a mother drawn toward the “now.” She herself having long ago rejected those times of the past. There was a sense that we were moving forward, that progress was the goal. What had come before — those old methods, those old ways — was something to be replaced.

But deep in my young spirit, I felt the tension.

Even then, even as a child, I was watching them — and something inside me stirred. I couldn’t name it yet, but I knew I was witnessing something true. Something solid. Something different from what the world was rushing toward.

But my teenage years and all that the 80s brought took me far from those ways of curiosity and observation — granted, it was a short period, but it was sadly too long.

By the time I was in my early twenties, I knew. I knew their way was the better way. I knew I wanted to live in the rhythm they had lived in. I knew I didn’t want the pace, noise, and emptiness that was already overtaking my generation. I wanted to live like them.

But by then… they were gone. The generation that had held such wisdom and knowledge — that they themselves probably didn’t even realize they possessed — were all but gone.

They had passed on, quietly — as they had lived — and they took with them the firsthand wisdom I didn’t know how to ask for in earlier times. And so, for over three decades now, I’ve been doing the only thing I could: trying to rebuild what they left behind.

I’ve spent years learning from the books they would’ve read, using the tools they would’ve owned, seeking out the cast-iron pans, the flour sifters, the embroidered linens — not for decoration, but because I want to live as they lived. I’ve tried to mirror the spirit of their homes: calm, ordered, faithful, rooted.

My furniture, mismatched to some, is a collection of the very things others once tossed away — but to me, they are beautiful echoes. My cooking methods may seem tedious to the modern kitchen, but I find in them a kind of peace and purpose the microwave will never offer. And as odd as it may seem to some, I feel a strange kind of companionship with those long-gone women when I press dough beneath my palms or hang laundry in the breeze.

I am who they were.

I wish I had honored them more when they were just down the street — just next door. I wish I had seen sooner that they weren’t behind the times — they were rooted in a richness we had already begun to forget.

But I know they’d smile to see what I’ve tried to do. Not just me — but so many like me. Older now, ourselves. And realizing what they carried was not just useful… it was eternal.