Women’s Work

She wakes at dawn. She brews a pot of coffee, carefully placing the cast iron pot filled with water and coffee grains on top of burning wood in the fireplace.

As the dark bubbling liquid boils, aroma fills the simple Syosset home with no electricity or running water. A woman and her farmer husband prepare for their long day.

After breakfast of fresh eggs, her husband hitches the horses to travel to Brooklyn for a few days to sell some produce. She carefully rinses breakfast dishes in a pail– the same pail of water she'll use to cleanse herself and the children.

Her name might've been Claire or other names popular in the 1800s like Alice, Susan or Jane.

I run the tap water freely (habit that I take for granted) and fill the coffeemaker to 6 cups, placing the white paper filter in the plastic cup and press start. Coffee brews as I take a hot shower for 10 careless minutes. I boot up my computer in the living room and scroll through e-mails, get another article assignment and e-mail requesting a phone interview. I never meet either person face-to-face.

Claire walks to the market on Jackson Avenue that is now Mitch O'Neill's to buy flour or cloth and collect the mail. She talks to the other women and the store owner, but can't have a drink in any of the saloons. The newly laid tracks extend Long Island Rail Road service to Syosset. The shrill whistle announces the train's arrival.

Then she walks back home, trailing her hand-sewn long skirt down the dusty road, carrying a sack of flour. At home, she'll carefully pack away the flour and cornmeal in the pantry and begin to mix the flour, kneading it into manageable dough.

I walk pass Dunkin' Donuts on South Oyster Bay Road, explicitly for exercise. Women dressed in suits, casual attire work clothes, scrubs or ripped jeans and work boots cycle in and out, buying coffee someone else made, hurrying on their way to work. A woman dressed in a beige summer suit walks down the curb toward her SUV in the parking lot. She answers her cell phone… "I'm on my way into the office now," she says, like the other Syosset women who work—contributing to the community like the ladies' auxiliary that helped create the Syosset firehouse. 

One of Claire's many jobs is to efficiently use water. Wasting time or resources during the light of the day could set her back, make her take too long in the fields, ruin a meal and cost money. She knows that waking just a half-hour later could delay a chore greatly and mess up her day. She's on a tight schedule. As the bread is rising, she walks to the barn to feed the chickens and goats.

Back home, I catch up with friends on Facebook and pay bills online, making efficient use of my time before I wake the children to get ready for summer school at Syosset High.

Women were the epitome of sustainability. When working the fields on the farm, they made sure to use every drop of water, every section of the vegetable–even boiling roots down for medicinal purposes.

I pick the children up from the high school and bring them to the Syosset-Woodbury Community Pool.

Claire comes home tired. The children are hungry and the bread is ready for the fire. In the gloaming hour, shadows elongate as the sun goes down. Claire takes the chicken from the fire. She knows it won't be long before the daylight is gone—she needs to hurry. She sets the table with milk from their cow, meat she salted and seasoned to stay fresh and butter she churned by hand.

On the way home from the pool, I drive through McDonald's for Happy Meals. At home, we gather around the table and eat off paper plates. No dishes tonight. My husband, Tom, and I will eat a separate meal later–maybe some hamburgers or vegetables on the grill. 

Claire washes the same plates again and sets them on the wash basin for tomorrow as the sunlight wanes. After the children are in bed, she lights the oil lamp and reads from the Bible, careful not to burn too much oil. It's silly to read it, she thinks, because she could recite the passage from memory.  She blows out the lamp, ending another day.

I read a few pages from Anna Quindlen's new novel "Every Last One" and shut off the light.  The whistle of the Long Island Rail Road moans in the distance as I fall asleep.