Few children nowadays know the utter darkness which sur­rounded us nightly in my child­hood. How safe and loved we felt within the circle of light from the prism-adorned lamp in our kitchen!

It was almost as rare as glimp­sing a shooting star to spot the lights of a moving car on the hills across the valley. There was no light visible from distant neigh­bors. When the sun set, we were in a world of blackness.

The family room of the past was definitely the big kitchen. There at the end of a winter day, my Dad would sit in a Boston rocker near the warm kitchen stove reading the paper, while Mother washed the dishes.

Earlier, we had eaten our supper, enabling her to read aloud from books like “Tom Sawyer” and “Little Women,” while Dad ate his supper and we lined up beside her, facing the stove. Later we could play games like Dominoes and Authors on the kitchen table, not considering the educational tools, just having fun.

The complete darkness pro­vided a wonderful opportunity for early lessons in astronomy, showing constellations like Orion and the Big Dipper. In contrast to nights of blackness, we so would look forward to the clear visibility of a full moon. We had heard tales of our great-aunts—there were seven of them—who didn’t let the the lack of sleds prevent them from sliding on the crust one moonlit night. From the pantry window, they took shallow milk pans and had the time of their lives whirling around on the crust in them—until they wore holes in the pans! 

The full moon had the same attraction for us, but we did have sleds of the Flexible Flyer var­iety. We would bundle up to go sliding on the slippery roads around our house in every direc­tion. There was bound to be no traffic, so we’d throw ourselves on our sleds gleefully and sail away. When we could no longer endure the cold, we knew there’d be molasses cookies and milk waiting in the warm kitchen.