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This is my brother born soon after ww2 ended in the 1940s. I was born only 14 months later and so my father must have been very happy to be back home.
This was our first house that we lived in, we were too young to remember this house shown above.
There I am at the first part of the 1950s standing by my brother. My father had this picture colorized.
I lived in the city and my father worked in the furniture store. My brother was perfectly made for city life. Me.... not so much.
I preferred the country, and that was obvious to me that when I was born, they messed up and I went home with the wrong family. Not really but I felt this way.
When I was a child I did not know that I would be learning lessons throughout my life to gather experiences that would help later on in life. If you do not experience the modern life and the old way of life how would you know that one makes more sense than the other.
By the middle of the 1950's my mother went to work at the Donruss Company, it was a bubble gum factory. My father continued to work at the furniture store. Later he owned his own store.
After the mid 1950's dad brought home our first television. My brother and I would sit on the living room floor and watch Howdy doody and the early shows and sometimes we watched the television symbol sign in and sign off on the television screen. Television did not stay on all night.
Then 1959 our house caught fire at 4:30 a.m. on new years day and my grandmother was visiting for the holidays. She came in to the bedroom and grabbed my brother and I from the back of my pajamas out of bed and pushing us to the floor and was making us crawl to the front door. Black smoke was boiling down the walls and we had to get to the door, there were flames to my left as I went through the doorway into the living room it was difficult to tell where we were. The smoke was choking black smoke and I will never forget the smell of our burnt house. We all made it out but the house was a loss and our pet bird named tweety bird did not survive.
The other side of my life was in Mississippi where my Great Grandparents, ,Grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles lived. This is where I was most happy. I loved walking on the dirt roads and the sound of bits of gravel under my shoes. I loved the smells and the sounds. I made imaginary houses out of sticks, I helped to collect eggs in the hen house and walked the rows in the garden to see what was growing.
This is where you could just sit outside and do nothing and be happy.
My aunt had a wood plank to walk to the outhouse at her house, my mothers cousins had horses and cows and big fields. I have stories about the old mercantile store that my Great Aunt and Uncle owned.
My Grandparents lived very simple, they did not have much money to live on but they made their way. They ate fish they caught, my grandfather hunted, they knew how to forage and garden. I remember when my grandmother got a wringer washer and I would help her to do laundry in the backyard. In my last post I talked about how my grandmother always had biscuits left over from morning breakfast in a pan with a lid and we would get real butter to put on the biscuit.
She made soup with vegetables, and on special occasions she would cook a ham or roast. When the family got together everyone brought food of some kind and when it was all put together it was a wonderful meal.
My parents divorced after the house fire, my brother stayed with my Dad, my mother remarried took me to Alabama with her. This is when I was a teen and I learned about farming, canning, sewing. I raised a calf, grew corn, fed chickens, went to school. I met wonderful people in a very small community that we lived. One of those families I became a part of and this is when I learned even more about farming, milking the cow, growing farm crops, getting up before dawn and stoking the old coals and getting the wood stove heated up for biscuits and breakfast so when everyone came in after tending to the animals we would sit down to eat.
This is a summer dress that I sewed for myself to wear while I was expecting.
Almost three years later we were expecting our first baby. this photo was taken on a very hot day in August.
When we arrived to Oklahoma we had no phone, no television, no radio, no washing machine and of course no dryer. I mostly washed clothes by hand and hung them out and if and when we could afford it and drive to a washeteria we would use a machine.
We could barely get by financially once we paid rent and gasoline to drive to the base. We could not get on base housing so we had to rent a few small towns away and as a house or apartment would come available we would move closer to the base. When we first got to Oklahoma our monthly pay was $98.60 per month and then we received a whopping $102.30 per month. Little by little our pay increased by a few dollars.
I did everything I had learned from my Grandmother to survive on little money, alone without family. We wrote letters home for communication.
I wanted to photo adjust this photo to lengthen my dress but this was the length most young people wore in the 1960.
I have told the story of a sweet dear lady that gave me her old treadle machine so I could sew baby clothes. When we came home from Oklahoma I had to leave the treadle machine because we would not have room in or tiny moving trailer for the baby bed.
I am removing the laundry from the line. I am thankful that we had to live with little money because it taught me skills. We still had no telephone, no television, washing machine when we moved back to Alabama after 4 years.
a few years after we moved back home, we had a daughter. We eventually bought a small farmhouse with 10 acres, it had hay stored in it so we had to clean that out and fix it up. We had a catfish pond and we lived there for while but due to a job change we had to move to another town.
After my children started school I went to work outside my home. I worked in special education, with severe profound children. I got off from work just before my children got out of school. I took classes as I could, I did this for many years.
I was offered a job working in physical therapy in the late 1980s, so I decided to take the offer.
My hair was still red in this picture, it just looks dark. I am a natural red head, well I was until I got older.
I loved working with children and then with patients in the hospital.
We made the same mistake as many people do, when we made a little more money we got into debt for a period of time.
I left work in 1999 to take care of my father and then my mother, then Charles Great Aunt. My health started declining during that time. I have had 4 pacemakers at the time of this post and several other ailments. I feel I have been given this life and as long as I can I will push through, and by making life interesting that helps a lot.
Skip some more years and the toll of caregiving, and Charles and I decided that our life was going in the wrong direction. We owed money, still had a mortgage, credit cards and we had to go back to basics.
We started reading history and picked back up on doing genealogy. We felt so much relief as we rid ourselves of modern household items and reduced our debt. Now there is no debt but our country is possibly facing a economic challenge. We are glad that we did this.
My mother was a young adult here, making simple meals. When modern times changed and they bought the tv, and then modern appliances, owing the store for new appliances. The house fire destroyed all they had bought. Then they had to start over which caused stress and their marriage fell apart.
They both went on with their lives and remained friends.
My Grandparents never changed, they remained the same always. They both died in the late 1990's.
I feel so thankful that I experienced life with my grands because I am not sure if we would have known what to do, had I not experienced the old way of doing things. We may have not reversed course as we did and gone back to the old ways. This makes me want to share what I learned from them.
So, I lived in the city, I visited and stayed with my rural family, I moved back in time to Alabama and learned farm life, lived a very frugal life with little money, I then joined the modern world, got into debt for while, we came to our senses and went back to our roots.
Now I have gotten old, I am bonified grandma, I no longer look like those photos, I am little heavier, my red hair faded into brown and then the gray and now, I actually look like my Grandmother when she was older! I wear aprons and smocks, I have a garden, I cook soup and Charles makes biscuits because he enjoys making biscuits.
If you do not like where you are going, turn around.
Grandma Donna
