When I was growing up, about half-a-mile from my house and just at the bottom of a really good biking hill lived our family friend and neighbor, Freda Johnston. Freda was probably younger than my grandmother, but she seemed older to me. It’s not that she looked old. It was that she lived old – as if she had come to life out of the black-and-white photographs my mother kept in the family photo album. Her home and acreage had managed to hold onto a time that had passed the rest of us by, and she continued to live a life I had never known, one that felt both familiar and foreign to me.

Michele Coleman

Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of...

Freda wore cotton print dresses that buttoned up the front, and – shocking to me – she wore them even on days that weren’t church days. Her husband, Homer, wore blue coveralls day in and day out. Inside her house, doilies covered furniture that was wooden and rounded and spotlessly dusted. Her kitchen appliances were white and chrome and also rounded, a shape reminiscent of ’50s diners.

I particularly remember being in awe of the doll that lived on her guest bed, a doll that wore a Southern bonnet and an enormous, multilayered, hand-crocheted dress. Fanned out, the dress covered half the bed. The doll’s job was to sit among the frilly pillows and look beautiful, not to be touched. I also remember Freda kept her canning and root vegetables in a cellar you had to get to from outside. She would lead us down steep steps to show off her stores. She dyed her pears a rainbow of colors, and the jars would wait in the dark like undiscovered jewels until we opened the cellar door to reveal their sparkling interiors. When Freda died, she left orders that her funeral dinner be served on china and not paper plates. She said she had washed so many dishes at funerals she had earned the privilege. Since she was not there to enjoy it, I felt the privilege was tardy in coming.

My Aunt Shirley was another woman time seemed to flow around and leave untouched. When I’d visit her farmhouse in Wendell, I’d often find her hanging her laundry out on the line unless she was still running it through her old wringer washer. She made yogurt in a thermos, cleaned and ground her own wheat and wouldn’t allow a television in the house. I never dared use her telephone. She was on a party line with two or three other families, and I was always worried I’d interrupt someone else’s private conversation. I mean, I wanted to hear the neighbors’ goings-on, but I didn’t want to get caught doing it.

Freda Johnston and Aunt Shirley just seemed to me to be a little better than the rest of us. They worked so hard; we were soft by comparison. They were untainted – too down to earth, practical and pure to be caught up in the frivolity of microwave ovens or frozen dinners. I don’t know that old ways really are better ways, but those ladies, with their starched ironing and yellowing cookbooks, appeared wiser than the present day somehow.

Now, as I’m entering the downward side of middle age, I am shocked to discover that I too am becoming a living relic. Not a wise and competent placeholder like Freda and Aunt Shirley, but more of a lost voyager who has Rip Van Winkled while the rest of the world has moved on. I honestly did not realize every other woman in America had stopped wearing pantyhose until I read an article about the demise of the nylon industry. Smart move, women of America. I hate nylons too, but no one sent me the memo about the revolution.

Of course, I’m still going to keep wearing nylons. I just don’t have the legs to go a la carte. When I’m 100, I’ll probably be ordering synthetic-compression pantyhose from the same murky sites that still sell Chiclet gum and cassette tapes. And I’ll probably have to buy my Ovaltine on the black market.

My transformation into a museum piece is pretty well complete, but I’m finding that I’m not so good at it. I’m not a classic; I’m more of a leftover. Like Freda, I boast a cellar full of canned fruit, beets and beans, but I certainly don’t let anyone down into my basement to see them. Some of the jars down there are older than my children. Many of them are unidentified, fossilized objects. And, frankly, I’m taken aback when young family members give me indulgent looks that say, “Isn’t it so fun that Aunt Michele keeps her oatmeal in a 5-gallon bucket?” I’m not trying to be cute. I’m not trying to be a living museum. I really want to know how everyone else is living. What do people do with their table scraps if they don’t feed them to the chickens? Where do they hang wet bedspreads and sleeping bags if they don’t have a clothesline? Is it strange that I make pancakes from scratch, can my own pie filling and grow popcorn, with no intention at all of celebrating the fact on Instagram? No one follows me but Molly, our dog.

In the end, I fully recognize I’m not film-grade quality when I do “vintage” things. Heck, I’m not even really vintage. Partially decayed, that’s what I am. Partially decayed and still trying to figure out what happened to the really good potato peelers they used to make …