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Time for some 21st-century appreciation MARK GUYDISH OPINION

Thursday November 26, 2009 | 12:00 AM

If you’re cooking the family feast, as my wife and I will today, you can count your blessings before the serving plates hit the table. A visit with re-enactors at the Swetland Homestead on Saturday gave me 212 years to be thankful for.

Be thankful you don’t have to collect enough firewood to burn for half the day in an open – and hard-to-control – flame. Approaching the historic building, we spotted one woman gathering loose branches near a small copse, a minor supplement to the numerous hewn and split logs already inside.

Be thankful you need not heft heavy iron skillets, pots and Dutch ovens as you bake your pie, simmer your soup and roast your turkey.

Said turkey, presumably, came courtesy of the man of the house, who stalked and shot the foul using a muzzle-loaded, flintlock rifle so you could feather and gut it (though I suspect the re-enactors didn’t get that authentic).

The lumbar and sacroiliac regions of your back are surely grateful you do most of your cooking standing upright on a comfortably elevated stove, not hunched over said iron cookware in your floor-level fireplace.

How convenient to simply twist a knob to raise or lower the heat, instead of fetching more wood or blowing through a long metal tube to fan the flames under your potato biscuits … from home-grown spuds, of course.

Appreciate the shelves at the nearby grocery store lined with 5-pound bags of sugar, a far cry from the scarcity of such a luxury in colonial America. For that matter, appreciate that someone else ground the wheat into flour for you.

And then there’s butter, which required a little cream and churning … and churning … and churning.

“How long do you have to churn it?” I asked when we walked in and saw the woman sitting with the little churner in her lap, working the plunge endlessly.

“A lot longer,” she quipped.

For those who came before us

A bit of cream splashed during one stroke, splattering on her spectacles and evoking a chuckle. It was demonstration of just one of many hazards we can be thankful we no longer face.

Not only can you walk to the fridge and grab a stick of butter, you can walk to your window and not worry about predators – animal or other – lurking.

The men had rifles and pistols, knives and hatchets. They talked of days with the militia, fighting first in the Seven-Years War, and then in the Revolution. There was also that less bloody battle over who, exactly, owned these parts of the new land, Connecticut or Pennsylvania.

So, yeah, be thankful those before you hashed out boundary disputes, allowing out-of-state kin to visit without arguing about what state, exactly, they are in.

And be thankful your hosts, whoever they are, didn’t take a page out of the 1790s cookbook and serve you feet pie (from cow feet, we assume) or tongue. Unless, of course, that’s a family tradition for your clan, in which case, enjoy!

Re-enactors, for the most part, stayed in character, though there was the moment when a secreted cell phone chirped, prompting one man to rush out of the kitchen while another declared it “witchcraft!”

The spell was also broken when a younger volunteer in another room popped in with an elaborate paper airplane.

“It’s 1797,” one man said. “We don’t even know what an airplane is!”

So be thankful your relatives did not have to spend days traveling by horse.

In short, be thankful not only for what you have, but for what others sacrificed so we could have it.

About the Author

Mark Guydish covers education for the Times Leader. Reach him at (570) 970-7161 or mguydish@timesleader.com.

A West Hazleton native, I worked as a service technician repairing electronic mailing and shipping systems, a bike shop owner and an Emergency Medical Technician (among other jobs) before landing a reporter job at the Times Leader Hazleton Bureau in 1995. I started by covering primarily politics in Hazleton City and outlying municipalities, eventually became "social issues" team leader in the Wilkes-Barre office with the accent on education, and headed the Hazleton Bureau for a spell before returning to full-time reporting, my preferred position. I'm an avid cyclist and rode across the country in 1990, a trip of more than 5,000 miles from New Jersey to Seattle and down the coast to San Francisco. Years in the Boy Scouts made me a life long backpacker and camper, and I've yet to find a better way to enjoy the quiet lure of winter snow than cross country skiing.

Mark also writes a regular blog for timesleader.com.