I am starting a new section of my blog today. It is called Back to the Old Well. Toting water from a well was part of the old way and I am thankful that I experienced that in my life.
Charles and I are starting new adventures. We will be part-time living the "very" old way going back to toting water to use for washing dishes, cooking, and bathing as soon as we finish the old transformation of the old workshop that will be turned into a tiny home.
This tiny home that we are working on I talked about in my last post under Living Like the Past.
We are still currently doing our history project of 1943 but I got off track posting about that due to some health issues but that is better now :) I am still doing the 1943 diary posts and we are doing our best to live like 1943. We live a very simple way already because of all of our history studies that you can find here on my blog. Since we already live more like the past it seems ordinary to us.
I choose to embrace the best parts of my life because those memories are what led us back to a more simple life. I write about it here on my blog because I feel that it gives others a new perspective so that they can have more options if they need them.
When we would go visit my grandparents we walked dirt roads and played with sticks in the yard and built pretend houses. There was a local artesian well down the road from my grandparent's house and we would carry buckets to get water and tote it back to the house. I can still remember the taste of that fresh water.
When we went to visit the cemetery we would carry a bucket with us and there was an old well at the cemetery with a hand crank pump that we would use to get water so we could carry water to the flowers on the graves of our family or to get a drink of water on hot days.
The hand pump would need to be primed with water to get the freshwater to come out of the pump. There would be jars of water kept at the foot of the pump to use for priming. It was very important to refill those jars of water so that the next person that used the pump could prime the pump.
When I met my in-law family they had just gotten an electric line pulled to their house. They still had an outhouse and a well for water and water from the well had to be toted into the house with buckets. There was only one electric line in the house and it went to the middle of the kitchen ceiling, it hung down with a lightbulb and the light socket had a plug outlet. There was the old wood cookstove that they used while raising nine children. Many biscuits were baked in that oven. Cotton fields were all around them.
Turns out later on... my mother remarried and my stepfather was a water well driller. I would help my mother make onion and bologna sandwiches and we would take them to the water well drilling site for the crew to eat for lunch. That was my first knowledge of a Vidalia onion and found that the large flat Vidalia onions are the sweetest ones.
I can say that water wells have been part of my life.
Long ago life was simple, the sounds, the smells, and the speed at which we did things. Much more relaxed than today.
We made meals from scratch and wore aprons so we did not get stains on our clothes.
We wiped down our shoes and polished them often, we hung up the clothes that we wore that day for two reasons, we did not have a lot of clothes, and because clothes were not washed as often as they are today. We hung our bath towels to dry after we bathed and Charles and I still do today. We did what made sense.
I often wish that our younger than me generations could understand and experience how it was long ago so they would know that it does not have to be the way it is today. Hectic, unsafe, and wasteful is how I think of today. I am part of that wasteful category but I am trying to be more like I was long ago.
Many years ago when I first started my blog, I was going to use the blog to share family history with my family. But the economy was causing hard times and the blog was there for me to use so I decided to share how Charles and I were trying to change back to a more simple life and live more like the past.
Through this change, we were able to get out of debt and see what our mistakes were that led us to that debt.
Here we are at the new chapter of our life again and there is a well on the property at the tiny home. Somewhat symbolic don't you think? So we are returning to the well, the source of sensibility.
I hope that as we go along you all will take away something that is helpful to you.
Living in today's time is sometimes difficult, and no longer simple. We can find ourselves overwhelmed very easily today but we can return to the old well and get a new perspective and with practice, I hope that we all can succeed and live more decidedly simple and without a real well.
*Note. I have never done a comment section in all these years until now. I welcome your comments. I will need to adjust the spacing but seems to be working well.
Grandma Donna
