TEAPOT TEMPEST OF THE DAY

I don't know what's going on, but this turned into one big paragraph. Sorry. Whoo hoo. The Tempest in a Teapot du jour. A democratic spokesperson, Hillary Rosen, lit a small bonfire when she claimed that Ann Romney couldn’t relate to the economic problems of women because she was a stay at home mom. Rosen should have thought things out a bit and could have phrased things a little differently. Ann Romney is out of touch, not because she's a stay at home mom. She's a stay at home mom with money. In a way this is just as much about Rosen as Romney. We’re gotten so used to buying what we used to do for ourselves that too many of us have forgotten everything that mom’s used to do. My dad was a logger and mom was a stay at home mom. At least until dad was a stoved up old logger tossed on the scrap heap with a daughter starting college and two much younger daughters still at home. Mom ran the house, cooked (from scratch), ran the garden, canned, froze, sewed, made sure we never ADMITTED we were bored, and stretched a dollar till it hollered uncle and then stretched it a little bit more. We had a huge Kenmore chest freezer that we filled every year. That freezer was four years younger than me and it didn’t get retired until we couldn’t get parts any more. The pantry held five hundred jars filled with beans, corn, peaches, pears, cherries, pickles, kraut, jams and jellies. The last were handy not only for us but they made great gifts. If you didn’t have anything else there was always the Heaton’s patented sauerkraut, dill pickles, jams and jelly. Oh, and if it was raspberry or boysenberry, those were our berries in the recipe. To top it off she took extension classes from the local community college for tailoring and upholstering. She added ten years to the life of a good couch. I can appreciate that it's hard to raise five boys. I"m betting that the Romneys never paid off the bills at the beginning of December facing the rest of the month with the modern equivalent of fifty bucks to make it through Christmas.