Does “Haste Make Waste”?
A few days ago, with several others, I attended the meeting of a woman’s club in a neighboring town. We went in a motor car, taking less than an hour for the trip on which we used to spend 3 hours, before the days of motor cars, but we did not arrive at the time appointed nor were we the latest comers by any means. Nearly everyone was late and all seemed in a hurry. We hurried to the meeting and were late. We hurried thru the proceedings; we hurried in our friendly exchanges of conversation; we hurried away and we hurried all the way home where we arrived late as usual.
What became of the time the motor car saved us? Why was everyone late and in a hurry? I used to drive leisurely over to this town with a team, spend a pleasant afternoon and reach home not much later than I did this time and all with a sense of there being time enough, instead of a feeling of rush and hurry. We have so many machines and so many helps, in one way and another, to save time and yet I wonder what we do with the time we save. Nobody seems to have any!
If there were any way possible of adding a few hours to the day they could be used handily right now, for this is surely the farm woman’s busy time. The gardens, the spring sewing, the housecleaning, more or less, caused by the change from cold to warm weather and all the young things on the place to be cared for call for agility, to say the least, if a day’s work is to be done in a day.
Some people complain that farm life is monotonous. They surely never had experience of the infinite variety of tasks that come to a farm woman in the merry springtime! Why! the ingenuity, the quickness of brain and the sleight of hand required to prevent a young calf from spilling its bucket of milk at feeding time and the patience necessary to teach it to drink is a liberal education in itself, while the vagaries of a foolish sitting hen will relieve the monotony for the entire day.
– Laura Ingalls Wilder,
excerpt from “Does ‘Haste Make Waste’?” (April 20, 1917)*
*Taken from Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks
