Electricity came to Oysterville in 1936 – the year I was born.  In Seattle it was 1910, the year before my mother was born.  And in Portland, 1888 – two full generations before FDR’s rural electrification program made it here to the outlying areas.

I’m not sure whether my grandparents and great-grandparents complained about that delay in getting up-to-date.  Probably not.  I doubt that they cared much about the amenities that might be possible were they able to plug in – except maybe the possibility of giving up the outhouse in favor of indoor plumbing.  That was the first improvement in most houses.  Once an electric pump could be installed and water could be pumped directly indoors… tah dah!  Flush toilets!

Those of us who live in the outlying areas take some pride in being able to manage power outages without much ado.  Granted, many people now have their own back-up generators but I tend to think that those folks are mostly ‘newcomers’ from the urban areas.  Probably a kind of reverse snobbishness on my part.

Actually, though, power outages are few and far between these days.  Just frequent enough to remind us of what life was like for our forebears. Not that we outliers don’t still have our crosses to bear.  Nowadays, it’s high speed internet access and reliable cell phone service that we can’t depend upon.  Until recently, I think I’ve shared the somewhat skeptical do-we-really-need-that attitude my grandparents probably had about Edison’s new-fangled invention.  Land lines and dial-up and other fledgling conveniences have been do-able.

But, suddenly Nyel’s medical needs have bumped smackdab into the twenty-first century.  He now has two devices – a pacemaker and a CardioMEMS unit – that depend upon satellite transmissions to the doctors in the big city.  They don’t work.  Not that we don’t have cell phone coverage here in the Oysterville outback.  It’s just not good enough.

Fortunately, the CardioMEMS machine could be re-calibrated this morning (by the patient, himself!) to transmit its findings through our landline.  (And thank goodness we re-grouped a few years ago and got that landline back after thinking we could save money by going completely cellular!)  As for the transmitter for the pacemaker – we need to see if we can’t turn this one in on an older model.

Like I’ve been saying for years… older is really better in oh-so-many ways!