Plastic and Wood

Objects of Different Times

I was seven years old.

Early in the day I trekked to my great grandparents' house, orange plastic sled in tow, to make use of the steep hills behind their cottage. I sat on a hand-made, uncomfortable chair to catch my breath and thaw out. Though snow was piled high outside, the old cabin was kept plenty warm by a well-stoked fire nestled in the hearth of fireplace. The only other person present to bask in the pleasant smell of burning wood and home-cooking was my great grandmother.

Always glad to see the 'youngins' as she called us, a beaming smile greeted me as she walked into view from the kitchen, smallest of the cabin's three rooms. She placed a tin tray of fresh chocolate brownies on the wooden coffee table in the center of the living room, warning me to let the brownies cool as she took a seat on her quaint, antique couch.

My mother was on her way to ferry me to her sister's place for more snow-related family fun. I loved sledding, especially with my many cousins of similar age, so I was unsurprisingly fidgety and frenetic. I recall my great grandmother, mamaw to me, remarking she could tell I was "rearin' to go" and I saw a similar excitement illuminate her weathered face as she fetched a pair of photo albums from an old, heavy wooden storage trunk.

I can't recall the particulars of what we talked about for the hour or so of my visit, but the focus of the conversation was on various people in our family who also loved sledding. I was shown winter-time pictures, even a few with sleds, of various family members and family-friends over the past three generations.

At the time, I derived no particular joy or lesson from the exchange, but today, nearly 40 years later, I derive both pathos and insight from that simple, wholesome visit. I took for granted the culture around me was going to be a constant in my life, not knowing how precious and vulnerable such things were in the 1980s.

I have a saccharine, romanticised view of my childhood as many do, but it didn't come to me until my 30s when I discovered multi-generational family bonding and cultural continuity were purposefully destroyed by the evil regime which rules over us. I derive pathos knowing that I experienced the last of a dying element of our civilisation, that I was both blessed and cursed to personally experience a crucial element of genuine folkhood which has become nearly eradicated in modernity.

Two materials stand out in this memory: plastic and wood.

Plastic and wood, what better way to express the differences in existence now versus a century ago. I can't recall a single plastic thing in my grand grandparents' little farm house. Everything they had was made by either their own hands or by those who lived in our shire. Their small house was made by my great grandfather, his father, and his two brothers in the early 1900s. The wood came from the local forest which my ancestors settled in the 1700s. The metal tools and bits needed to construct the house were made in Tennessee and Virginia by craftsman of my people, the Appalachians.

Every piece of that house, as well as the furniture within, was crafted by the hands of heritage Americans, mostly Appalachians. The aforementioned simple chair was made by my long-dead great uncle during the 1920s. He wasn’t a carpenter, but like many things during the Great Depression, it was made out of desperate necessity. The beautiful coffee table was made even earlier in the 1900s, hand-crafted and finished by a family of Virginian woodworkers our family had connection to going back to the 1800s. The trunk was given to them by a relative who traveled with a carnival during the 1930s. It was crafted in Arkansas and traveled across many states before retiring in my great grandparents' bedroom. My great grandmother's rocking chair was made in Gatlinburg by Appalachian artisans in the 1940s. She enjoyed reading in that chair every day until she died nearly 60 years later.

Whether manufactured or hand-crafted, objects of my youth often came with a story.

'Your grandfather carried this pocket watch every day, he bought it in Germany when he went to visit distant kinfolk before the war.'

'This table belonged to my great aunt, two generations of kids have played Monopoly™ and Risk™ on this table. This little scratch here is where young Jed fell and lost a baby tooth while the kids were rough-housing.'

'Your grandparents gave us this antique lamp from the 30s as a wedding gift, and one day when you get married maybe you can use it to read stories to your children like I read to you.'

I'm sure part of this is coming from a people used to living off the land, making the best with what little they had, and of course being poor... but there's something else, something magical about the objects in my life carrying a history, sometimes even a faux personality. Even today, in 2024, so many of the things my family, kinfolk, and neighbors use are old hand-me-downs. Whether it be a wedding dress, a gun rack, a muscle car, or a tractor, passing on items to others and sharing the story of that item is still fairly common around here, and the folk here share those stories with a mix of pride and glee.

Now let's contrast that with plastic. The orange plastic sled from my childhood memory was a cheap, manufactured good purchased from a local department store for a pittance of resources. It of course came with no story, was used briefly, broke the next year, and was consigned to the dump. How much of your life and experiences are 'plastic' now? I know much of my life is.

Plastic objects pollute our lives at every turn. Countless IDs and credit/debit cards. Packaging and wrappers litter the home, the workplace, and often public spaces so commonly we ignore them like weeds. Dishes, cutlery, shelves, boxes, and even furniture are now mass-manufactured with lightweight, low-cost materials, often made entirely of plastics.

None of these goods have a story or a history. They are merely a product of the time to serve a purpose, often not even made by your own people and coming from half-way around the world. It makes me wonder, how have we changed like the objects we use? Are we crafted with dedication and care? Do we have a story that will be told with reverence to those who come after us?

Or are we simply a mass-manufactured people to be discarded and replaced once we're broken.