Living Like the Past

To live a vintage life today we have to make it happen. What is vintage anyway? Vintage has many descriptions. It can be considered something having quality. A fine wine sometimes is a vintage wine, sometimes vintage is something of importance. Some may think of it as being old but some think of it as being classic.I feel it is the best parts of the past.This is Muriah, she reads and follows my blog and sent me this picture of her beautiful vintage treadle sewing machine. Muriah enjoys living a more simple vintage life. She is a beautiful young lady and this picture makes my heart happy. I asked her permission if I could share this with all of you and she said yes ......

The long Hot Summer... It started before Spring this year, it was hot early. Everything came early so I thought fall would come early and then winter and set things straight.But that did not happen. So many things just burned up and I decided to take what I could and concentrate them in small beds. My big plans of the container garden did not work out. I learn my biggest lessons from things that did not work out so this year I had big lessons.It caused me to do more research and I discovered that lavender does not like it wet. So I started over once again. To me life has a lot of starting over, isn't that we are suppose to do? We cannot just go within and just give up. I have tried tha ......

No, that is not a glass of wine on top of that stove. This post is to answer the cloth question from Julia. We are trying to find a better way to stop having so many wash cloths, dish cloths and drying towels that we accumulate each day. As I said in the previous post I had to ask myself the same question as it seemed I had done better in the past because I cannot remember using a lot of cloths in a days time. We have some very good responses.*********************************************************************Hi Donna,This is for Julia's email question. My kitchen is not as vintage as gDonna's, but what I normally use is one dish cloth a day. At the end of the day I wil ......

Charles and I have been on an adventure into the past for several years now. We have been going by memory of what we considered better times then going back further than what we had any memory of by history projects, much research and by doing.We started many years ago going to the library and reading books and looking through microfilms. Then we dove in further and started reading journals and real diaries and invested in purchasing some of them. We have read old newspapers and trying to find what was happening in the home, the home front. We were most interested in the home, not as much about the wars or the great depression because we have read about these all along. We ......

Here is the situation of why I have not posted in two weeks. This picture above is the first picture I have been able to save because I had to get a new computer this summer that I cannot seem to get used to. I have been using my old computer to resize my pictures and file them on a removable thingy because my new computer did not have a picture program that I needed. But, my old computer that was barely hanging on stopped working, ending my photo solution. So I bought a photo program to put on my new computer and it has been a nightmare for me to understand. Just today I have finally figured out how to resize a photo and save it and then find it (after ultra multiple tr ......

Moving Forward, by going Back to Basics.Life can change course on us at any time. How can we take care of ourselves and especially our children if we do not know basic skills when a financial difficulty strikes. This can be a job loss, injury, health decline or disaster.Basic skills for keeper of the home. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, mending and sewing, repairing, first aid, gardening, preserving food, meal planning and keeping a budget are a few of the things. Do we have the skills to do these things to keep our boat afloat so to speak? My Grandfather the lumberjack on left. My grandmothers brother on right. They worked hard, and lived without electricity and running water because it w ......

Our lives are delicate. Much more delicate than many people realize. When we are traveling from here to eternity there are a lot of changes.For the last several months I have had this feeling to get things in order, I am not about to tell you I am sick or leaving the blog or anything, I just feel the sensible thing is I need to do better at having the laundry done, folded, ironed and put away. I don't need to wait to finish a project, just finish it.I feel like we should always be ready for change as it does constantly happen. We watch our children grow, our grandchildren grow faster than weeds in our garden.Just looking back on my blog or my picture file I see how many changes w ......

The Sensible Refuge - The HomeWe have been canning vegetables, fruits, meats and getting the pantry re stocked. Fall is coming. I could say this again before winter and I could say this again before spring or summerI like to keep the pantry rotated and topped off. In the past there were no grocery stores. There were mercantile's or general stores and eventually grocery stores and supermarkets came about as roads were built and cars were sold but many people did not have them.Sometimes we hear about when cars were made or televisions were made but many people did not own them. When the televisions were starting to be sold there was no use to own one because many areas had no reception. Here i ......

This is not a post on Sarah's diary but a discussion of how Sarah's diary is affecting many of us that are reading the diary posts. We find that Sarah makes a white cake most every week along with several pies. I have received emails from those of you that find peace in Sarah's Diary. Some find inspiration and that they are finding more joy in keeping home.In Sarah's lifetime, it was common to bake bread, cake and pies as they did not have the processed junk food that we have today. Many years ago I also made white cake and pies.Charles has been helping me with the last several diary posts by reading the diary to me as I type and I could see the longing for the white cake as well ......

I hope I can type out the right words in this post that are coming from my heart. I feel that when I was a child I had one foot in the old times and one in the more modern times. After world war 2 was over life started changing quickly as the modern things of the 1950's were coming on fast and furious. Food was becoming more processed. It actually changed quite a bit during the war due to shortages. Then it was all about easier but it was not coming from the homemaker it was coming from advertising and door to door salesman. This was during the time that most any type of new appliance was being sold door to door. Insurance men came to the house to sell insurance and to ......

Sometimes life changes unexpectedly. It can be most anything. A job loss, a fractured ankle, a death of a loved one, a robbery, storm damage. Sometimes it is a good change, a new baby, a pay raise, a unexpected gift. Every day is going to be different and what we do with that day is a choice. Many of us live with some kind of pain, physical or emotional. Sometimes we can push through and sometimes we cannot. Most important is we try. As many of you know I have had some health setbacks this summer and I finally had to give in and rest my body and I also had to make a change. I had to heed the warnings my body was telling me and rest. It is important to underst ......

To me life had become just filler food. Before we changed to living a more simple old fashioned life I felt that I was going through life on just filler food. Spending on unnecessary things, shopping without making sure it was exactly what we needed. Often things ended up in the donate box or trash with very little use.It was like going to a buffet bar restaurant and eating a mixture of things that were not that healthy but something to fill us up.Many people today just buy to fill up that emptiness. Constantly looking for entertainment but never seem to get enough. All the while the credit card bill grows larger and most of the items charged are no longer even being u ......

This is the place I have spent a lot of time lately. If the pillows are at the head of the bed I can look into the kitchen. If they are at the foot of the bed I can see out the windows.I have been quite ill for the last several weeks. I have mentioned before that I have Meniere's disease, tinnitus and Hyperacusis.. It all has to do with the ears. Balance, nausea, vertigo, ringing, roaring, whishing noises and then if that is not bad enough add a megaphone in your ears making All sounds too loud. And to make it sound crazy but everything is too loud and yet I have hearing loss. Everything from water running in the sink to someone talking, setting a tea cup into a sau ......

Just a very short post to let you know I am not posting this week to take a needed rest. The heat really does me in this time of year so I am trying to take care of myself. I will be back at it next week hopefully.We also have a Great Grand baby due to be born next month. We are excited about that and I am putting together a new baby package to send with my daughter-in-law when she goes for her next visit. I have been taking this time to do some sorting of sewing items and a few drawers. I am thinking about the fall garden since we have so much damage to the spring garden due to the heat and drought. We finally got some rain this past week but not enough an ......

The food forest has been doing good until the drought started getting worse. We have watered every day and this is difficult for us because we try to conserve water and the plants do not like city water.We started harvesting something each day that will make a meal.It is such a good feeling to eat what we grow but it really is not easy for us produce enough in a small back yard to grow enough to be able to preserve much of the harvest. This year has been an all in effort and I have learned a lot such as I will give each plant more space so the bees can get to it and so it has a better chance to fight off disease. To grow only what we enjoy eating.But then there are the butternut squash ......

Can we really go back to a better place, a better time? We cannot go back in time but we can change our life to resemble the past. We do not have to live like others, we choose to live like others. If we want a more simple life, we start right where we are, right now, and we remove the clutter and the things that are standing in our way that drain our energy, rob us of precious time. We do not have to change an era to live a more simple life, we just live a more simple life.Today's world is complicated, irritable and fast and looking into how things were for our generations before us gives us some surprising answers. We found that we just wanted to live more like they live ......

We have been in the 90 degree temperatures and this is only May. Also it is very dry here which is requiring us to hand water our vegetables.We finally finished harvesting the cattle trough that held the garlic. I planted them last fall around October. Some of them split so we probably should have pulled them up several weeks earlier but they are still good. The bulbs we grow are smaller than the garlic grown in the north.But it is still garlic. :)We finally have bees coming to pollinate. We are so happy about this. It was such a worry to not have bees and it took a bit of thinking to get the bees to come to our garden and I don't know where they came from but I am so happy they ......

I took a chance and got a very early start with planting this year. There was a lot of covering and uncovering but worth it because I just do not do well with the heat and I wanted to get the planting and heavy work done before it became too hot.Just today we reached 90 degrees and it is spring so we may be in for a very hot summer.We put in several cattle panel trellises this spring. To me the trellis is land since we are short on that. If we cannot spread out we can try growing up.This is cantaloupe that I am training to grow up.A basil has planted itself in a begonia. Baby cucumber.Our first zucchini and it was very good. The over crowded herb, pepper, cilantro tank.The be ......

Note* I am typing this out 11/27 2022. If you are reading back over my old posts and have gotten to this point, I want to say that I have removed several diaries, I may mention the diaries in some of these posts. I had started posting diaries and posted too many and could not keep up. I was new at posting diaries and did not realize how much work it would be. So after about 4 to 6 months I got behind.I learned a new way of posting diaries in 2022 and so with the new 2023 history study I wanted to use these diaries and post them in a more organized way. I am sorry for the confusion. Down below now is the original post written 5/1 2019. You may e ......

The Walking Iris is blooming. Tomorrow this bloom should be fully open. I love to watch the different stages of the flowers.It has been mostly dry recently with a few rains here and there but under what we normally get this time of year.With all the gardening everything needs water. We have tried many different ways of watering our garden over the years. For many years we just used the water hose with a sprayer attachment, we tried drip irrigation which actually used more water than we expected. We have collected rain water whenever we can but we need rain to have rainwater and we fill watering cans and use those but it takes a good while to fill the cans. When it is so very hot outsid ......