Do you know what today is?

For the next few posts, Fridays will be unthemed. I was going to continue Photo Friday, but with last week’s post, you can likely understand if that goes by the wayside. I thought about advertising contests and conventions—and might still—but on thinking about other ideas, I began wondering if today was a holiday somewhere. As it turns out, it is a holiday, and that holiday made me a bit nostalgic, for today is Milk Day.

What, you may ask, is milk day, and how have we sunk so low in reaching for a celebration that we celebrate milk? As it turns out, today is the 135^th anniversary of the first day that milk was delivered to homes in those lovely glass bottles. By the way, if you want this one, you can "Buy it now" on Ebay for only $64.95--I shoulda kept Mom and Dad's old bottles. 

I remember having the milkman come a few times a week to our home in New Hampshire when I was a child. We had one of those tin crates with a lid outside on our lean-to porch. Mom would leave the quart bottles out for exchanging, with a note if she needed more than our “usual” amount. Once a week, if I’m not mistaken, she would leave the money out for our payment. When we took trips, she would call them or leave them a note in the box to ask them to suspend delivery, and on our way home, we would stop at the dairy farm to get enough to hold us over until the next delivery. He might have brought us eggs, too, but I honestly can’t remember.

I miss those days—the trust we had in our fellow man (leaving money and/or products on our front porch). I definitely miss how simple life was. There was no internet, no million channels of TV to choose from, no cell phones or texting. Things took longer, but I think we appreciated them more. Maybe I’m just seeing the past through rose-colored glasses or am growing nostalgic in my old age. Maybe it’s Gramma’s voice whispering in my ear, one of her colorful little colloquialisms—“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get”. In this day and age, we scurry like rats fleeing a sinking ship as we bustle from one important thing to another. Maybe it’s post-Christmas burnout or pre-tax anxiety, but I just want to slow down, to take things easy. The walk down the milky memory lane added fuel to my fire, I guess.

How about you? Do you remember the milk man? Do you ever miss those days when life seemed simpler?