The way the world is today, we need something that makes sense. We can make that happen in our home and if you remember nothing else in this post, remember this sentence, we need something that makes sense today and we can make that happen in our home.
This life journey that I have been on has taken me down many roads. I lived a time where there were still many dirt roads and houses without electricity and running water because it was still not available in certain areas. I am so thankful that I could experience this time in history through my family members that lived this way.
I am not against all modern things of today, there have been very good advances, but sadly most of these things come with a unaffordable price.
When Charles and I went back to basics it changed our life completely. We got out of debt, we settled our home, and we softened the noise in the home.
We are advancing in age and with that comes some health issues but I do feel we would have been worse off if we had not made the changes that we did make.
Recently we made a change and started driving just a couple of miles further to shop for food that does not come from a big box store. This is a small meat market and produce store in a small rural community to our south. The vegetables are seasonal and the meat is freshly butchered and cut or ground right there in front of you. None of this food is processed.
Two weeks ago when we went there, there was a bin of yellow squash that is still coming in from the fields since our fall weather seems to be late. There were sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onions, turnip roots and other vegetables still coming in from the farms. There are some glass coolers filled with bags of different fresh greens such a turnip greens, mustard and collard greens. There were also the old small country peas. It felt like it was long ago and I absolutely love getting our food there and supporting this produce market and butchers store.
We are searching to find our small farms outside of our city, we want to find our resources. Something to remember, many of the large grocery stores are shipping our food in from other countries and other side of our country and yet we have small farms outside of our cities need our support.
A little further away there is a organic dairy farm that sells from a honor system little building on their farm. We have small farms that sell fresh eggs, we have a buffalo farm and that farm has catfish ponds. There is a small farm that has duck eggs.
Find your small farms outside of your town or city, you might be surprised. I was surprised at how many goat farms that there are that sell goat milk and goat milk soap and lotions and such. I suggest doing a bit of research and put in farms near me in the search place.
I would love to find out what you find from your search and talk about it in the forum on this blog.
From the country...
To the new subdivision in the city... my life journey has been full of lessons.
This was my mothers house in Mississippi ( I have shown before) and I have so many fond memories when we gathered here after we had our own families. We would get together with my mom, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. I remember the trip that we tore off the wood on the front porch floor and replaced that wood over a weekend. The soup simmering on the stove and bathing the dirt and sweat off our body in the old white enamel claw foot tub. This was when my grandparents were living with my mother, they were in their nineties at that time. This was when life was modern and there was running water and electricity.
Charles and I found peace, when we took our old life back, and build our skills that our generations before us had. A combination of memory and research.
As in my article that I wrote talking about just step over the line, it truly is easy to change our life. If we want to do things that make sense we simply start right now doing what makes sense.
My generations before me that were in my life were three generations that took hundreds of libraries of information with them when they passed away, if I had only known I would have asked so much more.
Our old way of cooking on a modern wood cooker, this is called a rocket stove.
I have spent years researching back in time trying to find as much information as I can what things were like inside the home, how people lived before modern times. I have my memories of the squeaky hinges and creaking of the old wood flooring. The smells of dirt and wood, the sounds of nature, the home was not noisy as it is today and there was a feeling of wealth even in a very modest simple home. That feeling of wealth was from the strong and simple tools and well made items from long ago. The feeling was more than wealth, it was wealth and safety with the gentle but strong people in my life, the warmness of the handmade quilts, the way they stretched food, their sustainable life. People were more proper with one another long ago. Sure there were bad people, there has always been bad people but the majority of people were very proper.
When I think of the past I remember the sound of wind through the trees and the small sounds I could here, I remember fire flies that are no longer here and how my mother could name most every bird that flew by. How the farmers would tell the weather forecast by studying the clouds, watching the behavior of the birds, animals and insects. We have damaged our world and it has caused serious problems but we can help by each person working towards a more simple and sustainable life.
I am very fortunate to have the life experiences that I have had, and I have a fond memory of standing by my mother-in-law at her wood burning cook stove teaching me how put wood in the stove and get the temperature just right to bake biscuits which she did every morning. This was quite a challenge because at this time I did not know how to make her kind of biscuits and no matter how hard I tried they were hard and no one wanted to eat them. The dog would bury them. I finally learned how to make biscuits and baking them on the wood burning stove is just a memory now. That stove was a workhorse and it kept hot water available for all needs, it boiled fried and baked all their food.
This journey to finding simple has been an adventure.
Most everyone wants running water to their home, well water was very dependable at that time and still is today but few have that option. Today many places are facing a water crisis and we have threats to our water system.
Either way, there is something that we all need to do and that is to secure our water source, find the nearest water areas should we have a water crisis and learn how to catch and filter rain water. If we are in a drought, there is no rainwater to catch so we must be creative. Water is difficult to store but right now if it is available it needs to be collected and stored.
If we are in a flood, our water is most likely contaminated. I urge you to at least store some water.
My mothers cousin told me how they had no well or running water and her father would haul water to their house and he built a slide out of wood to slide the heavy water barrels off the truck and slid them all the way onto the porch on the house. This truck was most likely a 1930s truck.
We need to keep working at our skills and finding our resources. It is extremely important to be a sustainable as we can be and then live a calm life knowing we are better prepared.
It is difficult to think simple enough to learn the old way, today we have and use so much more than we "need". We should live a simple sensible life so we can be examples of what that looks like.
We are having more and more reasons to live a better prepared life. Today Charles and I are securing our home because of a hurricane to our south, this is a concerning storm and our daughter and her family live in Pensacola Florida which the weatherman is mentioning much to much and this is very concerning. We live in a area that gets the inland storms from the hurricanes,
I was transplanted here where I live and I would rather be further north but now there are so many kinds of disasters it is difficult to figure out where there is a safe place to live.
I lived a big city life, I lived a rural small farm life and now a mid size city life. I went backwards, I lived a big city life before living a farm life and I feel that this was a very good thing because I know how to adjust from having and not having instead of the other way around.
During my childhood when I lived in the city, many of my family members lived rural, some without electric and running water and some with simple electric and hand pump well and such as that. This helped me to adapt when I married and moved away where I had electric and gas but did not have any modern things to use. My refrigerator, stove and hot water heater were my modern items. There was no telephone, no radio, no television, no washing machine, I did have an iron and a refrigerator and well water.
I cannot show you here how I did things without these modern items of today, but I do tell you and show you in many posts on my blog how to do them.
There are so many things in our homes today that cost us to use, and we can live perfectly find without them.
Charles recently had a total hip replacement and the waistband to his underclothing and clothing was a problem because it rubbed over the top of the incision where the incision was tied off. His surgery area had some extra fluid under the muscles and it swelled up, he got an infection in his incision requiring wearing a bandage longer. I thought and thought what to do and remembered the men's underwear from the past, and found that they still make men's one piece underwear that buttons all the way down. This was the answer to our problem, I found these on Amazon and I would suggest them for a surgery that the incision is at or close to the waist area.
He started wearing overalls over this underwear when he needed to go outside, and he walks around in his men's nightshirt or robe when inside the house or just the two of us. I wanted to pass this along for others in case you need a hip surgery or any kind of surgery that would involve an incision / bandage at the waist area.
The hurricane coming could cause power outages, we do not need to go out to stock up on anything because we stay prepared.
We do not have a large freezer because of power outages. We have a small fridge and a small freezer on top of the fridge. We are very limited with what we can keep in the freezer.
We have a small electric icemaker that will run on our solar generator because it makes the ice and then you can turn it off so we can extend the need for cold. If we lose power we would start cooking these foods first and we have the option of canning our food with our propane stoves.
We have a good supply of fresh butter in the fridge right now so this afternoon I am going to go ahead and before the hurricane comes inland I will make ghee with this butter and put it on the pantry shelf with the other ghee I have made so that we do not lose the butter. It does not take long to make ghee.
I learned how to make ghee at home from watching the youtube channel called Rose Red and she has several videos on how to make ghee from store bought butter, so look for her most recent videos on how she makes it.
When a hurricane is in the gulf and it comes inland, and when we are on the east side of the storm, the dirty side as they call it, often the storms produce, high winds, flooding and tornadoes so we must take this serious and work ahead of the storm with decisions what to do with the cold items before the storm gets here.
So our life that makes sense includes being able to do most anything we would do on a normal day even when the electricity and running water has stopped.
This is a good way to look at this, what did our generations before us do when there was no grid. They baked pies and made meals and cleaned their homes and we can too. I would much rather it be this way than to sit around being miserable waiting for it to come back on, it does not have to be this way.
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Here in the southeast a simple meal, not the main meal, but a small meal was made of cane syrup butter and biscuits. I know many people in Covington County Alabama that ate this often.
In the forum, if you have the time I would love for you to do some research and find if you have any small farms that sell to the public that you do not know about but you do now. I would like to know if these farms are just in my area or everywhere. I did a google search not expecting much and I was truly surprised at how many farms that we do have and this is important for people to know.
Those of you that are in the path of the hurricane let us know where you live and how you are doing after the storm passes.
Are you having storms, fires or floods where you live? Do you have ways to get through these kinds of things without running out to stock at last minute? We are here to share how we do these things.
Grandma Donna
