Living Like the Past

I have several emails sitting in my draft that I cannot reply too because it keeps bouncing back to me due to an error in the email contact form.Please check your address after filling out the contact form so I can reply to your email and if you have not heard from me after 48 hours please try again and make sure your email is correct. I enjoy hearing from my blog visitors. Thank You, Grandma Donna

We continue our journey to live more like our generations before us lived. My husband recently kissed me and said, you make life so much fun! He truly loves living more like the past than people do today. This could have something to do with the outdoor bath house he is building. I am getting excited to show you but it is not quite finished. I can say he has not bathed in the house in over a week now. I am waiting until it is completely finished because I don't want to fall over any boards and things.We are constantly coming up with ways to do things the old way or better. The good part of living today is knowing how to change the bad part of the old way.Not everythin ......

I hear many people talking about how bad things are these days, if I ask the question do you remember a good time in your life what would you say? Many people enjoy talking about the good old days, some lived in a time when life was hard work or they were poor but often they find good times in those hard times. In the south you hear people talking about family living close by, shelling peas and butter beans, children playing outside. About two years ago during a thanksgiving meal the main conversation was about Corn dodgers and the eldest family members started talking about how they were made. Each having their own memories of how their mother made them. You could see in their ey ......

We all live in different types of dwellings, some modest and some fancy. Some of us stay home and some are hardly ever home. No matter where we live, there is a flow that is going on every day. A money flow, an electricity flow, a water flow, a food flow and more. Things are flowing in and out and some people never stop to think about how much they are in control of the outcome of that flow which affects our budget.We run to the grocer store to pick up items we need or we decide to go get fast food. If we break down this simple grocery run we find that there are many things to consider. Do we meal plan and shop with a list so that trip to the store will last and we don't have t ......

Should we worry about how unsettled things are in our world? If we listen to enough of the news it could make us sick with worry. How do we cope with this unsettled time? We start at home taking care of our family or ourselves if we live alone. The year before last we had a very bad storm. It knocked down trees, power lines, phone lines, destroyed houses, roofs and we had a lot of destruction in our community. We were plunged into darkness. In a matter of hours people started coming to help. They had chain saws and combined muscles to pull debris away so some could get out of their houses. Even the grocery stores were out of power and had their own problems. A local chu ......

We feel it has been a very good thing to return to a vintage life. It has made us focus on what is important. We have gone back to basics and have so much more purpose in what we do.White cotton fabric is something I keep on hand so I can make my own table runners, curtains, napkins and gifts.In the past people did things that was more casual and did not cost anything.This is where we would go swimming in the summer.We went fishing often and ate what we caught instead of fishing just for sport. I am actually over on the side here with a fishing pole trying to catch the fish they missed.These are some beans we picked yesterday. We live in the city on a small lot and yet we find pl ......

It has been very hot this week, the upper 90's. We have added fans to each room to boost the air flow so we can bump up the temperature so the air conditioner will not run as much.Did I tell you we are growing lemongrass in large pots this year? We have two of these and I really like the smell of lemongrass. I picked some blueberries to make some muffins.I like to have something sweet made in case someone stops by.In the past it was common to have a cake, pie or cookies around but now in this time it seems people don't visit as much.This was dinner two days ago. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, yellow squash and butter beans.We have the three large pots of okra......And they are s ......

It all started with a bar of real soap.Several years ago when our health came to a tipping point I panicked. I realized that we had been traveling down the same road with everyone else. It was like we were going the same direction but did anyone in the front even know where they were going or why?I did not know that the soap we were putting on our skin was not real soap. It was called soap but it was synthetic soap. What goes on our skin goes into our body. My husband had developed psoriasis. He never had it before, why did he have it now. So we got off the road everyone else was on.It took a lot of searching and research to find real soap and once I did and sme ......

The weather is much warmer now and some days it is hot. We opened up the shabby cabby in the backyard to let the air run through. We do that often on nice days to keep it fresh inside.Remember the recent picture of the cardinal eggs?We have babies this morning. They just hatched and they are just skin and fuzz. We have not seen the daddy at all since the eggs were laid and he is suppose to take over feeding. He should have been around to feed his mate but no sign of him and we are concerned he has been killed. She is doing a good job so far by herself. I hope she is not a single Mom. After they hatch she is suppose to leave, daddy is suppose to feed them and mom is su ......

Do you sometimes wish the styles would go back to the days when people dressed more proper? It would be nice if we had better choices. Even on hot summer days people dressed respectable.QuestionIf they did not shop often, then did they buy all their seasonal clothes at once? How did they get these clothes and how big was their wardrobe?Well, that is a bit complicated to answer. It all depends on where they lived and the income of the family as to how many clothes they would have. However, people did not have a lot of clothing as we do today.Something that is often forgotten is that many women would sew their own clothing. It was very popular to sew your own clo ......

When I was growing up my mother always kept sachets in our drawers. Pictured above rose petals and lavender. Sachets go very far back in time and used often to keep the drawers and closets smelling nice. Often sachets were kept in luggage.You can dry your own flowers or herbs. Here is a garden rose I picked today to show you. It is actually hanging upside down which is the best way in my opinion to dry the rose. You can put it somewhere dark and dry for several weeks. You can also order lavender and roses that have been dried over the internet to use to make your sachets.Here is a finished sachet. Many people are sensitive today to strong perfumes and this is a nice way to keep the clo ......

Recently I did a post about sending in letters of your memories of your family long ago. First I would like to say this photo above is of my family from the past. This was a family gathering on a hot summer day in Mississippi long ago. Standing in the back row are several of my Great Aunts and Uncle when they were young. The fourth from the left top row was one of my Great Aunts that I miss dearly, my Aunt Nina. She and Uncle Less Owned a small country store near a bridge. The roads back then were dirt and seemed to be forever long roads. But those dirt roads made memories. I loved going to the store and the sound of the creaky wood floors and the creaky screen door as it opened with t ......

Many of my visitors to this website enjoy the old posts and they email me to tell me how they enjoy the posts about the old days. Recently one of my visitors posted how her Grandparents lived in a very frugal way and had no waste as we do now and she asked, I often wonder what other people remember of times past and if we share common memories, what do you think? So I told her I would ask all of you. Do you have memories of the old days, your parents or Grandparents? Something you would like to share?I asked her if she would be the first to send a post so here is a post from Judi.Hi Donna, We are from Australia and I live in a town called Culcairn now but grew up w ......

It seems that whenever I get out of the house I run into impatient people. Someone honking at another driver, grumbling at a checkout line. People are impatient and that is not healthy. Do you live in a rush?Do you see the two people in the photo above? Yes they are there.Whatever stage you are in your life right now, young, middle or old age, time is going to pass very quickly like it or not. Why not live a good simple life so you can enjoy each day as it passes. Your child may be age five right now but in ten years he or she will be 15 and in another ten years they will be twenty 25 and you will be in your 40s, 50s or 60s depending on what age you were when you had your child.I have ......

This website has grown since I have been posting for a good while and I wanted to take you through the basics of how to search through articles.*** Important if you have sent me an email and I have not answered you it is possible that you made an error in typing in your email address. That has happened many times and when I try to answer it will bounce back to me saying email error. Please re check your email address because I want to be able to reply to you.I have listed on the top bar (using a computer) topics such as living like the past. When you click on that topic a long list of articles will show and at the bottom of that page are page numbers that you can advance through. There are M ......

My blog is all about living a more simple life and more like the past. Not in the past but like the past. Recently I have been responding to visitors to my blog and their questions. A few have asked me if I could post pictures of inside the houses during the 1940s and 1950s. I have a very limited amount of photos of inside due to most pictures were taken outside back during that time. One reason is the cameras were different back then and the flash required to take the photo. Most photos were taken of the family.I have dug through my photos to see what I can do to give you at least a glimpse of the 1940s and 1950s inside the houses.If any of you would like to share pictures that y ......

I have been asked several times by visitors to my website how people dressed in the 1940s and 1950s. So I am doing a post on how they dressed in the house or when they would leave the house.In the past women wore dresses most all the time. Pants were worn on occasion for some types of outings such as picnics which back then people often had picnics at least in my family.During these times people visited each other often and is was very common to just pop unannounced because many people did not have telephones during this time. It was acceptable to just show up. Women mostly wore house dresses which would have been a simple dress. In the 1960 and forward a house ......

Have you ever walked along a dirt road? I was thinking how long it has been since I walked a dirt road. When I do think about it there are such fond memories of Mississippi. My Grandparents lived in Mississippi and when we would go to visit them we traveled miles and miles on dirt roads. This was a time before many roads were paved in Mississippi. It seems to me now knowing the difference that there was a certain cooling effect in the areas with dirt roads. I liked to play outside and make houses. I would find sticks and lay them down flat on a grassy area on the ground and form rooms. I made doorways where I could walk into the rooms and I would sit on the ground pret ......

In the past we used our fabric scraps, saved string, removed the buttons off old clothes and cut out the better part of the fabric on the item that was too stained or torn to use anymore.Today many people just discard anything they do not like or want anymore. Some just shove it to the back of a drawer or closet and go out and buy something new.Once we go back to living simple we become more relaxed and frugal which is a good thing.This is one of my favorite aprons. It is very old and it was pieced together. The bottom of the apron has added fabric and their was not enough of the blue fabric to have enough to continue all the way across. So it was pieced with scraps of the blue making this a ......

I love using the old things of the past. Some things just make better sense to me or I am just a romantic of the older eras. This is what they called a milk jug cover and they used them to keep the flies out of the milk. It was also used for a bowl cover. This particular one was made in the 1920s and I don't set it on a shelf, I use it.This is a smaller one that can cover a glass or a cup to keep gnats out of a beverage.This one can be used for bread dough, sourdough or a milk jug if you happen to have your own cow or goat and need to keep the gnats out. The idea here is a net like fabric with a crochet edge with beads to weigh the cloth down on the sides.Here another one wi ......