Another Reality

Yesterday I was at my Dad's house to clean up some water that had gotten into the basement after a heavy rain on Monday. Petal (a nickname her dad had given her), my dad's new young Jamaican caretaker, was helping me. There was lots of stuff to throw out with boxes getting wet and such. When we came across an old iron, the kind you heat up on a stove, Petal said her mom had used such an iron on her school uniforms and when she was done you could stand them up in a corner! She also said they had a curling iron for your hair that you heated up like that too. I said, "Didn't you have electricity?" She said yes, but they didn't get an iron until 1989. The same time they got color TV. Up until that time they had watched black and white.

Copyright © 2007 Deborah Sharp Loeb