Living Like the Past

This morning we had our first frost. This time of year our citrus trees are starting to ripen but are still not ready for harvest. Several years ago I would be very concerned and start tossing blankets over the citrus and doing my best to wrap them when I knew a frost was coming but I soon realized that they would make it through a frost and I was doing more damage than good trying to help them. A few more weeks and we should be able to start harvesting. This coming weekend the temperature may get down to 37 Degrees / 3 degrees Celsius. That is still not a freeze so this is good.We share our citrus with some friends from India and they are very ......

We have dropped below 50 degrees / 10 degrees Celsius and finally the flannel can come back out again. This weekend we are supposed to drop to 41 degrees / 5 degrees Celsius and I am so happy :), I have rearranged our pajama drawers, pulled my warm flannel tops and cardigan sweaters forward. I happily pulled everything off this shelf and pulled the flannel sheets and pillowcases from the back corner. It is a good day!This morning I washed and hung out the cotton sheets that will move to the back corner of the linen shelf to join the other sets. We rotate two sets of sheets for summer and two sets for winter. We also keep an extra set of each put back. W ......

I have been working on a new household schedule. Two months ago I purchased a daily appointment book. I decide that if I was going to keep our house more organized that I needed to pencil in all the things that needed to be done and I soon found out that there is not enough hours in the day.So I look back in time because that is what I like to do. Above is a 1932 grocery ad, the month of April. In the past shopping was normally done once a week and on a certain day, being that there was money for food during this time.Many years ago I would take my mother-in-law grocery shopping and we would go on a Thursday and she would buy nearly the same food each week. She k ......

Our latest research has been about food. Charles and I have been studying and doing history projects for many years now because we want to know all we can about what was it really like in the home many years ago.Recently in a post I mentioned that I have researched our family tree for many years and also we had DNA taken. The past few months we decided that we want to try eating traditional meals that our ancestors ate. I am starting to understand more about the many recipes such as the Sunday Roast and the recipes for pies and casseroles. There are history articles about the history of the casserole and such as that but like we do about all o ......

This photo is of my Grandmother in the year 1908.And this is a few years before she passed away. She was a wonderful, kind, loving, humble and Godly woman. I have been very fortunate to have many special women in my life and even those that lived further away and I did not get to see as often had lasting impressions on me that I never forget.They had strength and gentleness that is missing today and I cannot put into words to explain the differences of long ago and now other than they were good people and there was something very right about how they lived. My grandmother is the second from the left of the five women seen in the photo. The next two women next ......

People come up with sayings such as we should not live in the past or never look back. These are just words that someone says. We know that we cannot live in the past but we can live like the past. I enjoy looking back, there is so much to learn from the past and I get a lot of clarity when I do look back at history and also study about our ancestors.I love the old textiles and the embroidery on my vintage aprons. Charles and I have been studying the home front and the life inside the home for many years now and we have learned about our Ancestors and how people lived without all of the modern items that we have today and so much more.For the last few y ......

I have been looking forward to the new season of Fall and here it is now where we live. The daytime temperatures are still uncomfortably warm but they are gradually going down. We have had a few cooler days where I could open the windows and leave them open most of the day. It is more pleasant when I go out to hang the laundry and this makes me want to do a good washing of everything before cold weather gets here. I have been cooped up inside with air conditioning because I could not tolerate the hotter temperature so now I plan to soon enjoy being able to being outside and do not want to miss any beautiful day. There is still very dense vegetation ......

Charles purchased a fresh ginger root this past week and we have been enjoying fresh warm ginger tea with lemon and honey. We have ginger growing in pots in our yard but they are not ready to harvest. The glass is from a set of glasses that Charles Father bought him for drinking root beer a very long time ago and now we use them when we want a special glass as I did this time with warm ginger tea. The first few days of last weeks internet outage was quite frustrating but then I decided that I needed this to happen because I started feeling better about it all on the third day of the outage. Each day that went by I started questio ......

This is Tim, Grandma Donna's son. Mom asked me to let you know that their internet is down and due to Covid there is a long wait for service repairs so there will be no post this week. Here is a photo of Frank, Katherine's brother. She also wanted me to remind you there are many years of post on this blog and for me to show you how to go back to read the old posts. See below: And asked me to put at least one or two pictures up of something we have that is vintage so you have something nice to look at and to tell you all to have a safe week. So here is a photo of my 1960's Gibson Three Hundred guitar amplifier. I'm not sure if that is what she meant but that's how I (rock and) roll.

I am back at my desk this morning after quite an interesting day of storms that produced severe thunderstorms and tornadoes and it ended last night at our house like the grand finale of a fourth of July fireworks show. A family member called to say there were 7 tornados in all this commotion yesterday, three touched down. This all came from the last of the trailing feeder bands attached to hurricane Ida. The last tail pushed south of us back into the gulf which makes me wonder what all that will do as it drags over central Florida and out into the Atlantic, if that is where it goes.Yesterday's post was about organizing our first aid cabinets out of necessity.It ma ......

I can see that life is going on all around us even during this critical time that we are living.Somehow a seed was planted in this small crevice and this plant grew despite it's location. It has had just enough nutrients and water to give it life. Even when we have been planted in the middle of a crevice or two busy and very loud roads as where we live, we can still blossom. The last eighteen months have been a trying time for many people but we can find balance. It may be organizing our household, business or talking with a friend to find that balance. A different perspective can help us when we are in the middle of a ......

I thought I would do a short post and a comforting video for this weekend. Tropical Storm Fred is still on the same path at this time heading in this direction but these tropical storms often change tracks so it is always wait and see.Those of you that have followed my blog for a long time know we have changed and moved our clothesline location four times now. One year a Mulberry tree suddenly appeared in our yard. Nature has a way of planting things for us and sometimes it is not always where we want it. It grew very fast and shaded our clothesline. So we moved the clothesline further away from the tree. The next year it had grown so much we had t ......

I did not show you the inside of the pie from the last weeks post. The Pie was delicious and I wish I could have shared it with you. I found myself overwhelmed this past week with learning new things with the internal upgrade to my website, two computers crashed after that, it had nothing to do with the upgrade, some issues I had before the upgrade. Now I am making this post and a video on a completely new computer so I am still learning my way through all of this but I continue to make progress and I feel good about that. I would like to mention that we have some tropical storms (potential Hurricanes) brewing in the Atlantic and look ......

When I was a child and visited my Grandparents, Aunts and Uncles I would tag along as my family would walk along the gardens and talk with one another and admire the blooms of all the plants. There was a special fondness of flowers and I could sense their knowledge of many things that I did not understand.In the past there seemed to be more thought and appreciation for flowers and trees than there are today. When we traveled anywhere, a short distance or a long distance, my mother would name the trees, bushes, flowers and the birds. She came from that impressive generation that seemed so sensible to me.My mother would s ......

More than ever we need to think about our home as our refuge because that is what it is. Our safe place, no matter what type of home this is or where it is. We either take care of it or abuse it or neglect it. A home will rot, decay and the earth will take it back when no one takes care of it. It is there to provide us shelter, that is what a home is, our shelter.When we embrace our home or even our little space, camper, room, whatever that place is that we reside, then we can make it special and make it how we want it to look. Sometimes it is just giving it a good cleaning and some fresh paint. My mother bought an older home an ......

We live in a fast paced world and so much has been lost to everyday distractions. Our generations before us never had the things that consume our time. I feel that we have too much and many people feel we are suppose to have all of the things that are offered today and somehow think that is being successful.I am not sure this modern world has accomplished making items that make our life easier. When Charles and I started removing items from our house it was a relief and we realized that many things had become a burden. How many appliances can we have? Too many.We did not just remove but we brought in more items that were more functional and purposeful a ......

Living simple and intentional can change our lives and get us out of debt, I will explain.My first blog post on this website was July 5 2011. My blog was generations before us. I had posts before 2011 but lost the posts before that doing upgrades. I changed the name to gdonna.com to keep it simple. G stands for grandma that is why there is a G before Donna. My blog was about genealogy, our generations before us and learning to live simple. Charles and I wanted off of the train wreck we seemed to be on. In the 1990's we were both working and eating out often, we had acquired debt because we were just following along life as many people did. ......

I have just started doing very short picture videos to add to my blog posts. My reason is I want to do something to add some calm, joy and encouragement because of the state of the world. It has taken Charles and I a long time trying to figure out where we wanted to park our History studies and get on with living Like the past. We have not parked ourselves anywhere, what we became is a mixture of the past and we are happy with that. My daughter cautioned me recently after I was discussing decluttering the house. She does not want me to get rid of too much because then it would no longer be interesting and homey and she never feels it is cluttered.She reminded me ......

Our 1923 Treadle Machine named Clara.I am not sure how our old singer made it to our house from it's original Norfolk Virginia location. I wish I knew where all it traveled since 1923 but I imagine that Mrs. Carney must have loved this machine. Her name was scratched into the case and the year she received it.I love the sounds while peddling the old girl as she smoothly sews along.It has been a simple week full of wonderful finishing projects from sewing, organizing and Charles Birthday.Here is a picture video of our week that I made for you, I hope I can remember how I did this so I can do more of them. Just click on this link to watch and when you finish x out of the video to come ba ......

Finding ContentmentContentment comes from within us. Of all of these years that I have lived so far, the people that I have met that I feel had contentment have been the people that lived a simple modest life. They mostly have been from the generation that we often say were the best generation, those that lived through world war 1, the great depression and world war 2. It must have been the trials that they learned to be contented with whatever it was they had.I have seen it on their faces and mannerism. Sitting in a rocking chair just happy with a breeze. A little soft chuckle over a simple thing that they have seen off in a distance. A peace that I rarely see anymore. Many ......