About gDonna
The photo is my son and myself. Now days you can get a photo made to look old like this one. This photo was taken when this was the new look.

Harry S Truman was president when I was born and world war II had ended. I grew up in a time when lunch was put in a brown paper bag and a sandwich was wrapped with wax paper. There was no such thing as pantyhose, we wore stockings that attached to the rubbery clippy things that attached to the girdle. Convenience stores were not common and when we took a trip we packed a picnic basket because many places did not have fast food. Highways had places to pull over and stop, some with picnic tables. Read more ....
 

Donna's Diary Posts

My Favorite Blog and Books
Recent Posts
To live a vintage lifestyle
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 ......
Mid May Update
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 ......
Vintage Clothes and Hairstyles
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 ......
Simple Sachet
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 ......
More memories from the past
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 ......
The Old Days
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 ......
What's the rush?
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 ......
How to use this Website
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 ......
A Peek Inside 1940s and 1950s
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 ......
Clothing in the 1940s and 1950s
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 ......
Dirt Roads
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 ......
Piecing Fabric
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 ......
A time that makes sense
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 ......
If you can't move to the country
Spring is approaching and this time of year I daydream of moving to the country. We have remained in the city and in our small house and small yard. Several years ago I realized that I was bringing the country to me. Many of my relatives have lived in the country as I did for a time as well in my younger years.Our small front yard garden can produce a surprising amount of vegetables and herbs. The past two weeks we have been preparing the beds and planting. This year I have decided to plant mostly carrots in the beds since this past year did so well with the small test spot of Danver Carrots.We decided to go back to a potted garden in the back yard and it is coming along well. We keep ......
If you only knew
We all go through things that make us sad but it is up to us what to do when we come out on the other side of whatever happened. Some of us go through terrible things but then comes a time when we are farther away in time from what caused us the sadness and if we have given ourselves adequate time that we need to recover or grieve there should be a turning point. We either pick ourselves up or remain depressed and what we do can affect those that love us by the state of mind which we live. If our sadness is due to the loss of a loved one we will always miss them and so we learn to live another way while we remain here on this earth.A man that lives in our area grows camellias. He enjoy ......
Editing our life
Some people question why we would want to live old fashioned. Why do you desire to live in the 1940s they ask? We do not desire to live “in” the 1940s just “like” the 1940s. It is only a reference point to study the history. We have an advantage and know that many things that were sold even back then were unhealthy especially the processed food that were more available due to ww2. Sourdough Starter bubbling.....Through our history project we have learned we did not want to venture much farther past 1948 because we know now when the consumerism started ramping up and food was becoming ridiculously processed and unhealthy. It had already started back even earlier. With new inventi ......
We are moving but not from our house...
Yes, we are moving up to the year 1948.As some of you know we have been doing a one year history project living as they did in 1943. We have been at this 8 months now. We have stalled out because we are doing the same things over and over because we can only simulate the rationing as much as we can read about. We have read and talked with many people and what we found out is that quite a few families moved in together during ww2 for several reasons. Men going off to war leaving the women behind and also a housing shortage, the need to combine efforts and simple life was quite a bit different back then where families could pool their ration stamps. They could not share them but they c ......
Fitting into a small home
I have always lived in a fairly small home. Never been one to want a large space. I enjoy the coziness that comes with a small home. But then there is the issue that it can get very cluttered living in a small space.Back in the year 2000 it became quite clear just how packed and cluttered our home had become when we moved my father into our home after being told he could not longer live on his own and his health was declining. The need was immediate which meant moving him from his home to our home right away. We were already cluttered and then we were packed. Our whole house felt like my pin cushion I call Ruth. We packed up our clutter to make room and lived with boxes ......
Pick up Sticks
The last post I was putting the bread in the oven to bake and this is the bread after removing it from the oven. I just love homemade bread and even though I make it often I never tire of the warm smell in the house.My daughter makes bread more often that I do because she is feeding more in her household and when we go to her house it always has that smell of home and fresh baked bread even if she has skipped a day or two.Since we have been living a more simple life and setting our home back to when we felt life was more settled and comfortable we have become more accustom now to entertaining ourselves as we did many years ago.Older games can be quite entertaining and they do not ......
Early February Random Thoughts
At our house February is a bit quiet because it is too cold to do much outside. Like some, I am a bit sensitive to cold as well as too much heat. But we can't always have it just right because everything has a purpose and we need the changing seasons.So I am back to making Bobbin Lace. It is a bit tedious and it takes a good while for me to make a simple piece of lace.Here I am just finishing up on a piece that will be used as an insert lace.It has four types of stitches, the ground, cloth, spider and footside. This is one skill that I cannot leave undone for very long or I have to go back and practice before I can continue because I will think, how did I do that?This morning we had cheese ......
Loading more pages
Loading more pages

NEW! Join the mailing list to get email notifications when new articles are posted to our site.

Your information is safe with us and won't be shared.

Thank you for joining! 

IMPORTANT! 
You were sent an email to confirm your subscription to our mailing list.
Please click the link in that email to confirm or you won't be added.
If you have not received the email within a few minutes please check your spam folder. 

 
Loading More Photos
Scroll To Top
Close Window
Loading
Close