Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea

[ailbhe]

Wait - all those maids and hired hands described as French are actually black, aren't they?

I think I preferred the books before I realised that.

Comments

[jenett]

I do mean power steering, sorry - brain somewhat fried by other stuff in my life right now.

Her description was that - at the time her family got their first car, which was early 30s, it was a lot of work even for the young men in the family. (I seem to remember her saying it was a different kind of strength, too - because it's twisting, not lifting or pulling, etc.)

There is also the question - yes, you have that strength, and I do, and so on. But we also have decades of practice building that strength, in all sorts of ways. If you spend your life not being encouraged to develop the strength, the muscles don't just appear magically when you get a car.

You can look at this with some vintage clothes: the arm holes are *tiny* compared to what we're used to in some cases, and it's not because the overall size is that different - just very different amounts of developed muscle.

(The thing that's currently eating my brain is providing coordination and support for a friend who just had hip replacement surgery. Her hip was injured when she was 5, so there's 40+ years of *not* using certain muscles going on, on top of everything else.

We keep having to remind her physical therapists that it's not a matter of getting 'back' to where she was pre-surgery, but that she was adapting around it for so long that the muscles most people have there don't work. They might sometime in the future, with more time to develop, but right now, focusing on other ways to do the needed stuff - getting into and out of bed, for example - is probably more use. Likewise, if driving is hard work, messy, and complicated, maybe you take taxis or trains or all sorts of other options instead.)