Immediately after breakfast, papa used to hurry outside and gulp deep breaths of crisp February air that was laced with a bit of fog and a tinge of frost.

In those olden days, outside air was cleaner than the air inside the house which reeked of smoke from the wood and coal-fired kitchen range with a sheet of protective asbestos nailed to the wall behind to serve as a firebreak. And there were odors from mama's cooking: fatback, burned toast, coffee that boiled far too long, and of course the ugly odors of the pot and the slop pail.

In contrast, if one today ventures out of the kitchen after breakfast and during the swell of commute traffic, he or she is surrounded by gasoline fumes, belching 18-wheeler diesel ogres, aircraft roaring overhead bombing us with jet fuel residue, smelly garbage dumpsters, a neighbor burning trash in the fireplace and acrid insecticide and fungicide caught up by the wind winging its way to town from yon farms and dairies.

If I'd known then what I do today I'd have been tempted to bring my gas mask home from World War II. I mean if we didn't have to do it to keep alive most of us would be walking around holding our breaths, particularly when one catches a view of what's in a silvery ray of sun light filtering through a tiny hole in the patio roof or a teeny crack in a window shade that illuminates millions of floating particles of dust, lint, hair and I-do-not-know-what-all, and headed directly for our noses.

There was a time when one threw open the windows to air out the house. Today we invest in filter gadgets to clean out what does get in with the windows closed.

And if you're old enough, you may remember the old backyard clothesline. (They were always in the backyard to conceal from passersby women's bloomers, girdles and petticoats and men's long johns and red woolen underwear.) Well, they've also become an air pollution fatality, at least I can't recall seeing a clothesline in years.

And at one time they were a backyard fixture just like backyard privies. But that's another story.

It seems like only yesterday that milady of the house scorned electric dryers because she wanted her laundry to not only be kissed by pure sunlight but bathed in the fresh outside air.

Ah, I remember mama yet, removing a garment from the line, rubbing it against the face and saying, “Oh, how clean and pure it smells.”

Her only worry back then with hanging Monday wash on the line was that birds passing overhead might do do do on it.

But even then, I wouldn't be surprised but what clinical studies would probably prove that it was 25 percent cleaner than it is now because of being washed in polluted water.

And does anybody out there remember blue skies?

Comments: Woody Laughnan, vallefox@accessbee.com