When ‘staying home’ simply was the norm

LORANE — This concept of staying home must seem very strange to our younger generations, but it is familiar to me. When we were raising our family of four kids, I made one trip to town a week to get groceries, and the kids and I celebrated by having lunch at Bob’s 19-cent Hamburgers or Arctic Circle before heading back home.
Our kids played with each other and with the Talley kids who lived across the street, building forts in the woods, riding horses, or jumping from the hayloft in the barn into broken bales of hay. There were a lot of chores to do, inside and outside, but few sleepovers or playdates in those days of the late 1960s and early ’70s.