This past January we started off the year with a new history study of living like 1943. Now it is already November, we have kept up with the two 1943 diaries and we are doing our best to continue to study and live a similar life to 1943 in our home.
This time of year is when we start thinking what will our next history project be and we are in the very early stages of this now.
First a little bit about home. As many of you know we have been busy up at Myrtles, our old shed/workshop now itty bitty house. We have taken a break to catch up here at home. Since we took a bed up to Myrtle and we did not have the time to shop for a mattress that we took the mattress off of the the guest bed in the blue room. We had an iron double and an iron twin in that room.
We decided to put the iron double bed in our bedroom and store the vintage dark brown wood bed for now. One reason is this iron bed is "Very Heavy" and difficult to store. This bed is a lovely part of history.
So now the blue guest room has an iron twin bed and my sewing items. I know that most people use their master bedroom for the head of the house but we leave the master for our main guest room and it has a half bath and that makes it more comfortable for guests, more private.
Also, even though our bedroom is very small it makes the most sense. It is in the center of the house and we can hear the sounds in and outside of our house for safety. We are just off the kitchen and we can close off the house for cold weather if we want and heat a smaller space. We can do the same with cooling the house, we can cool or heat just the bedroom, kitchen and dining area and be very comfortable while keeping the electric bill down.
We now have the ability to turn off our water and drain our pipes during a hard freeze since we had the plumber come and put in a special valve. This way we do not waste water dripping water through freezing weather with no certainty that the pipes will not burst.
Our studies about the past just make sense. The reasoning, the sensibility and the quality of the past has brought us to a new level of understanding to where we simply desire to live this way.
I have to be honest, it is difficult to live more like the past in a modern crazy world, but once we are in our home that is where we are changing. It is a slow process but Charles will retire soon and we want to live a very simple life. He will no longer leave out and come home with company electronics and have time to work in his little workshop and garden. He is working longer because we are saving to pay in full to have a new roof put on our house before he retires.
Our lemons are more yellow than green and will soon be ready to harvest.
The carrot tank is doing well, the radish tank has gone radish crazy and the onion tank did zip "O". Oh I take that back, it made one onion.
The turnip tank is doing very well and we are growing them for their roots since we do not have room for growing greens. We add the greens that we grow to soup.
It has been terribly dry here and crunchy. The leaves are still falling, most plants are dying off now because it is fall and the fact we need rain very badly and I am trying my best to keep what I can watered.
Albert is sad, see the tear in his eye? His peppers have stopped blooming but there are still some to harvest. He has been a wonderful guard goose for his pepper patch. We will plant him something else and that will make him happy.
We started off the year of 2022 with a lot of information about 1943. These are from the microfilms today in 1943.
I want to add bits and pieces of information off and on until the end of the year. This weeks paper in 1943 has a ration guide. This is what Lena (our 1943 diary) would find in her paper and where she would know what her points were before she went to shop.
She talks about she went to the A & P and the ad would also list points. So everyone had a way to know how many points they needed to buy their food. They could not purchase the food without the point stamps no matter how much money they had.
The paper would list the radio schedule and the times. The radio did not stay on the air 24/7 like it is today. They would sign on and sign off the air. This above is this weeks radio show schedule.
Special notices were posted when they had updates. These came from the microfilms of the real papers this week in 1943.
There is more than you may realize from studying the home front from many years ago and very empowering to learn something we did not know.
The title of this post is Down the Road. That is written on the November picture on our calendar with a beautiful picture of a farm and a dirt road.
We can use the term down the road, to look ahead or look back. Down the road could be used to tell someone, there is a store down the road where you can buy groceries. Or, there was a country store down the road from my Grandparents house that sold meat and vegetables and household staples. The store sat beside a bridge that crossed a river where steamboats traveled up to Memphis. Before that store had electricity it kept the items that needed to stay cold in a cold chest that held ice. Ice came by boat or rail and the insulated ice wagons would wait at the train station to take it to the businesses and homes. Insulation would most likely be straw or sawdust. Normally an ice house would be sitting by the railroad as it did in our town. So with history you get a good mental picture of what it was like.
Studying history is important because we can learn why things happened, how things happened, the good, the bad and the ugly. It is not something that just happened and was the end of it. Researching and learning history will give us wisdom. We take away the knowledge of what is good and bad and then we have a better perspective. We can see how our generations before us carried on before there was ever electricity or running water.
We have learned that they had tools, equipment and household goods that helped them to be self sufficient. After learning these things I started having the feeling that we are now limited and dependent on goods that break easily and need replacing quite often putting an unnecessary financial burden. We have purchased a few helpful items from the past.
Charles and I want to know more so we will continue to study history,
Grandma Donna
