Living Like the Past

This is part two of items in our home that are vintage and also have a good purpose. Go to part one first if you have not already :)I had one of these cake carriers a long time ago and found one at a yard sale for .50 cents. I was so happy to get another.....Got rid of the plastic canisters and went back to tin/metal. These have no damage to the inside. I have a love/hate relationship with plastic. It is lightweight but I am not sure that it is good for us.My husband went back to using handkerchiefs and so did I. It just feels right again.We changed our drinking glasses. I had to look for some old ones that I had liked in the past. These wheat desig ......

Why do so many marriages fail? What is true love? It is being with your best friend, that person that you never run out of things to talk about. It is being with someone that actually hears what you say and engages in conversation and you in return hear what they say. It is being with someone that you love more every day and they feel the very same way, neither would ever physically harm the other and if you did have a disagreement you work things out by the end of the day.Years ago while I was at work (in the medical field) I looked out the window into the parking lot and I saw an older man get out of his van, get out a wheelchair and set it on the passenger side of the car ......

Water and food are the most important life sustaining needs we have yet it seems to me by my observation that many people give those needs the least attention as far as home management goes. Many seem to have no food plan and rely on fast food, processed, and often purchase ready to eat at the drive through or go inside and eat something fast and easy not considering what was is in that food and what we put into our stomach. In many homes it takes a holiday with platters and bowls of food that have taken days to prepare to get people to gather at the table. In the past it was simply normal to cook meals at home.For some, grocery shopping is a mundane chore and I see people reach fo ......

We decided to build an outdoor bath. We tucked it away between the back of the carport and my husbands small work shop.We had several reasons to make an outdoor bath. We are trying to conserve water and bathing outdoor we can capture the water to use for plants instead of letting it go down the drain. If we have rain we do not capture the water and let it soak into the ground so the trees can take up the water, if it does not rain we can stand in a washtub and save the water for the plants. We use good non toxic soap. It also gives us an extra bath when we have company and for when we get dirty working out in the yard and very good if the power is out.We built this out of us ......

Nostalgia - A wishing for something that happened long ago or is now far away.We are living in a troubled time right now as I am writing this article. People have emailed and told me they are very tired of all of the madness out there. They have found their way to my website trying to find something that makes them feel better. Some say they find peace reading my website and I am happy that it can bring some comfort. We knew when we started living a more old fashioned simple life we needed to rid the home of televisions. We left one for the purpose of watching an occasional movie. The way things are now watching television can possibly make us depressed. I can tell you that ......

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 ......