Presents...
...I was five or six years old when we got electricity put in the house. I had the measles, chicken pox, or something and was upstairs in bed. And while I laid there thinking about how miserable I was, a stranger came up the stairs and started drilling holes in the floor, and wall between the bedrooms. Then he pulled some wires up through the hole from the downstairs into my bedroom where I was.
It wasn't long before he had a wire running through the wall into the girls bedroom, and one stapled up the wall and ceiling where he left three feet of it swinging in the center of Arnold's and my room. Soon he also had a wire dangling in the center of my sisters bedroom. Then he went downstairs, only to return a few minutes later with some metal things he called `sockets.' He connected one of them to the end of each dangling wire in the bedrooms then pulled a white glass thing he called a `light bulb' out of his pocket and screwed it into the metal thing.
All the while I watched this with the greatest interest. By now, I was not alone. My sister, Isabel, was paying quite a lot of attention to the activity in her room as well. When the man was finished, a `light bulb' hung in the center of each of our rooms with a chain and string dangling from each of them. By the time he went down stairs for the last time I had completely forgotten how sick I was. In fact, I wasn't even in bed.
Of course, we had to play with the pull cords some, even before they turned on the electricity. We pulled the cord very carefully at first. Would we ever be in trouble if we broke these things! It was fun just listening to the switching sound it made as we gently pulled down on the cord, time and again.
Then, later, when they actually turned on the electricity to the house, we really had fun turning our lights on and off. I tell you, we gave those pull cords a real work-out the first couple of days! But the real exciting thing didn't happen until the sun went down. As it started getting dark outside, inside it stayed almost as light as it was during the day. It didn't get dark inside! We couldn't believe it. There was absolutely no comparison between how much light a coal oil lamp gave out and our new light bulb. Before, when it got dark outside, we were in the dark inside. But not any more! We would never have to be in the dark again. Of course, it didn't take long for us to put away our suddenly antique oil lamps, for a new day had dawned.
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Revised: 2 May 96