A lot of history gets lost because no one writes it down…I was brought up by a mother who was a librarian and worked on many oral history projects — capturing the voices and stories of the generation before hers.

Yes, we have technology now, and use can use that for oral history, too. Or you can write a story. Maybe tell a story to your kids. Perhaps capture some stories from those we will lose.

I’ll tell a story – and I hope you will tell a story either in the comments, or on your feed…maybe we can start a trend!

As a child, my grandparents told me of life in “the old country” and one of the most fascinating things I learned was that there was no garbage. That’s right. NO GARBAGE.

My great grandfather was an apiarist. They lived in a shtetl in Hungary. (If you tell this story to your kids and they don’t know the words…aren’t you homeschooling?)

When someone would get married, he would give them a glass jar (locally made) of honey covered with a cloth (left over from hand-me-downs that ended up in squares, and finally in quilts) tied on with a ribbon. When they finished the honey, they would wash the jar and bring it back and they’d buy honey from him, which he’d place in that jar. Never any waste. And talk about business development in a closed society!

They grew what they ate, with the “ends” going to the goats, or into compost. No waste.

My guess, although no one ever mentioned it, was that they used tree leaves for toilet paper since no one manufactured toilet paper until 1857, and it likely didn’t make it to any of the shtetls as they were closed societies.

As an aside, my grandmother died in 2006 at the age of 107.