I belong to a group on Facebook that celebrates the wacky things that can be found at thrift stores and garage sales. There are some truly bizarre things to be found on the secondhand market. They're not all necessarily necessary, or tasteful, or a good idea in any way, but it's fun to see what other people find.
Lately, there's been a trend of people showing off their collections of mid-century Pyrex, or their restored-to-the-1970s kitchens. My sister and I were discussing this trend the other day, and how it sometimes confuses us. I missed the post where someone was bragging about locating a harvest gold refrigerator, but my sister was floored. Who on Earth would want that?
I pointed out that the more average person last saw a harvest gold refrigerator in the mid-1980s, before it got replaced with something newer. The people who were so excited to find this fridge never knew the game of carefully placing produce to prevent freezing, or the dubious thrill of discovering the soda that had found its way to the back and was now the only kind of slushie you were going to score any time soon (We have soda and a freezer, reasons your mother. There is no reason to spend two dollars at the gas station.). These sentimental folks only dealt with the fridge in perfect working order, rather than something that was "still perfectly good, just with a couple little quirks."
"It has a few quirks" is my family's code for broken, but not broken enough to be replaced, per se. When I was a kid, we didn't have harvest gold appliances. My grandparents did, though. They had the full kit--washer, dryer, fridge, and stove. Don't get me wrong--we had slightly more modern white appliances, but we still had the area in the back of the fridge that froze produce, and one of the burners on the stove had decided to pursue a new career. Most of the families I knew had similar situations with their appliances, but where I come from, you don't throw out appliances willy-nilly. You basically used them until you had no choice but to replace them. If you replaced them earlier than that (you spendthrift you), you installed the old appliances out at deer camp or passed them on to someone who needed them and didn't care much about looks.
I'm at least fifty percent sure that the harvest gold appliances were a splurge around the time that my parents and my aunt got married, in the late '60s-early '70s period. The appliances were still in regular use in the mid-'90s, when I would spend a week or so at their house every summer, so I reckon that they lasted longer than most marriages. It was a good run. I think my grandmother was sorry to see them go, because they were total troopers.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that we don't have nostalgic feelings about these things because they were still in use a lot later in our part of the world. My mother still has the teacups from her Pyrex dishware, because those things were amazing for dyeing Easter eggs. It was startling to see Emma Stone served tea in the same design in The Help, because they were still in my mother's cupboard and therefore, not that old. Totally that old. Also, the gold all falls off if you put them in the dishwasher, which is good if you want to use them in the microwave, and according to some websites, they contain a concerning amount of lead (feel free to draw what conclusions you will--we know we're odd).
We also had a lot of the big serving bowls that people collect as kitsch growing up, and they're still there. They still work, so they are still earning their rent in the kitchen. We have joked for years that the average antique dealer would faint dead away to discover how many vintage treasures are still in regular use in the family kitchen, since no one woke up one morning and said, "Well, the casserole dish is fifty years old now, so we have to retire it and shop for something new." As I type this, I realize that the plate off of which Fuzzy just ate his dinner was purchased in the mid-'90s on clearance at K-Mart. Still works. I don't see a reason to replace it.
I wonder if stainless steel is going to be the harvest gold of our generation. Will our kids have quiet conversations with us about perhaps considering updating things a little, perhaps with a nice harvest gold appliance suite? The mind reels.
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