I have done a lot of thinking lately about the things we have learned researching back in time. I keep wondering about if things were as difficult as people have said they were long ago, then why are so many of us drawn to the past? We romanticize the past, is it the pretty clothes? Is it the slower pace and how people seem to be more attentive? Work was hard back then and many modern items has made chores less difficult today. But there is something they had that we are missing today and I feel why some of us have this pull to the past.
I feel it is the sensibility and I still hold to that.
I feel the strength, the sensibility, the determination, the common sense and the love for one another. There is a disconnect today that there was not back then.
As this study has gone on I feel more calm as I am trying to resemble this time before the 1940's. I find myself more at peace and I feel like I have truly found home.
Finding home is here all along. As I let go of the many modern gadgets that we had I started finding a pattern. Without us realizing it, recipes were put out while marketing new kitchen gadgets. Fancy but complicated recipes came about but if we had certain gadget we could do this or that. It is a bit of brainwashing they do to us to make us think we must have something. "We need it". As I let go of the crazy breakable gadgets, I found that much of my cooking went back to basic food. Nothing electrical, nothing with parts, just a potato masher.
Nothing seems more like home than making a pie. We do not need anything fancy to make a pie, a rolling pin is good thing to have but a bottle can be used if we don't have one.
I cool my pies like my mother did on the window ledge because it just feels like the right thing to do.
I can say that I truly had a struggle last year to scale down when we divided our house to make guest quarters and our house is already small so it was a bit overwhelming how to do this and how to scale down and keep the house still whimsical and the feeling we wanted without being overcrowded.
I had said and still say I am not a minimalist, minimalism makes me depressed and I want useful and interesting things around me. This has nothing to do with clutter, I got rid of the clutter. Clutter is something that collects dust or are duplicates because we have so many that we could not find something and went out and bought another. It can be items that have no place to go because there is too much stuff that has no purpose.
Charles and I love plates that are pretty and make the table look homey. We prefer to sit down at the table and look at our food instead of a television.
I always dress the table with linens. They often do not match but that makes it even more interesting. I love when I wash the linens and they hang on the line they decorate the backyard like flowers do.
If I did not go outside to hang the laundry I would miss so much that is going on outside. The birds chatter that I am the only one hanging laundry for miles around!! I really believe they do as they gather on branches with great interest.
I find that there are many misconceptions about things today. One person can start a forest fire literally and misinformation can spread the same. Our Great and Grand Parents understood things better than we do now because they used the tried and true methods and passed their knowledge generation to generation until about the 1950's and 1960's.
I am once again finding home through the old literature to put the missing pieces from what I can barely remember because it was so long ago.
The diaries are helping me find balance as at first I didn't understand about the washing and ironing having to be on a certain day but now I am understand more than I did.
I did a post long ago about the old way of ironing using a sprinkler bottle. There were no steam irons so they sprinkled the clothes and rolled them up to disperse the moisture. Here I just sprinkled..
Then when you roll them the moisture spreads around. This sprinkling was used to activate the old starch if you used starch or just to dampen for steaming affect.
The ladies in 1932 would have been shocked to know this week I actually washed on Monday and Ironed on Tuesday, the appropriate days of the week. You know those embroidered kitchen towels that have those saying?
Well, to know if they are accurate this is what they will say,
Church on Sunday
Wash on Monday
Iron on Tuesday
Sew and Mend on Wednesday
Errands and Visiting on Thursday
Clean on Friday (Meaning deep clean)
Bake on Saturday
I have a letter from long ago to my mother from my Aunt Leona. My mother must have written Aunt Leona and asked for her sweet bread recipe. The top is a short note, then the recipe and then at the bottom she writes that every Saturday she bakes 4 loaves of the sweet bread.
Table linens smell good too when line dried.
Each time I put clean table linens or sheets on the bed that have been sun dried I feel good. If I did not have a place to have a clothesline I think I would have to find a friend or family member that would let me put a clothesline in their backyard so I could hang my clothes.
When you have a linen closet that holds folded sun dried linens you have a wonderful smelling linen closest.
I wanted to share something I found from the 1930s. I was happy to find that Kirk's Castile soap I use for bathing, cleaning and making laundry soap has been around for so long. I had no idea until I saw this old ad.
I have no affiliation with this soap I just happen to use it. I find it to cost less than the other good soap. I don't like to use synthetic soap so I use Kirks or Dr. Bronners and such as that. Now I make my own soap but I run out occasionally because I also give it to family.
Since I did away with the sewing room I have been moving things around trying to fit things a different way and I have managed to make a sewing corner. It still needs a little work but it is usable.
Charles built a new bookshelf so I put the old one in the kitchen. Katherine approves because it did not interfere with their water bowl.
Finding home is finding happiness. We can feel at home when we are with someone we love. That can be our family, a close friend or a pet. Finding home is inside of us, it is a feeling. If we remove the clutter in our life, that can be clutter from things or clutter from too much stimulation, clutter from too much noise, then we have a better chance of finding home.
We can buy a house or buy a place and then we can turn that into a home with love and dedication.
I am reading the diaries at night trying to get familiar with their handwriting. I will be posting more soon, there is much to do with getting the information scanned in and such, also I have a new computer that is not as familiar but I am working it out each post.
I went back to January and added names to titles of posts to help you find the monthly post of certain diaries. I will get it worked out and I will be posting January entries on the other diaries in February so you will not be behind.
Grandma Donna
