It is time to change the formula.
This world has become very difficult and it is easy to lose our perspective with so much turmoil. I have to find a way to navigate through this time safely and keep our little space that we live protected.
In the past I would go home to my older family members to get filled up with love and wisdom and my get my perspective back on track. Now that I am older, all of those elders are gone and I can no longer ask them for advice.
Fortunately there is one thing that I can do and that is to pull from my life experiences to help navigate my way through as my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles did. Those experiences showed me what truly simple looked like. I feel that I was shown things on purpose so I could share them later and now seems to be later.
There is a big road block to living like or similar to how our ancestors did, we do not have today what they had that helped them to survive difficult times. They were better off in many ways because a large percentage of people lived on small farms and in small towns people still kept livestock and nice size gardens.
The other "advantage" is they did not have the technology that we are almost required to have and depend on today and can suffocate us if we have no self control . Our technology is trapping us, and just a simple outage can bring things to a full stop.
We can say that technology has helped us in many ways but I add that we have also lost so much in the process. Quality of life seemed better when I was younger than it is today considering just being human. People talked in person more often and there was more decency and not as much tension as there is today.
In my immediate family, some of them that lived during the great depression said they did not know there was a great depression because they were poor and lived on a farm and it just seemed the same. One thing is that they always had food, sometime it might not have been much but they had food.
We can be poor and still be happy because I have seen that in my family. It all has to do with love and strength.
The old way did not depend on electricity or telephone and currency could be exchanged, bookkeeping was pen and paper. Here at home we can still live the old way "but" our banks have changed, our grocers have changed, our medical care is very complicated. We cannot be naïve about where we are heading.
So what do we do? I think that we need to take seriously the things that are happening today and we must learn how to live the old way again but figure out how to navigate the problem areas that our generations before us "did not have" that would have caused them to possibly not survive their hard times.
A needle and thread and a pair of scissors was all that was needed to sew most any kind of garment. We do not "need" a machine.
With all of our history studies that we have done, and living through a time not having modern items, I do understand living simple. Charles and I cannot grow enough food in our backyard to sustain us, we need grains and sugar, dairy and such. We do not eat a lot of sugar, we do not put sugar in tea or coffee, but we need sugar or honey to go with yeast to make bread unless I make sourdough. By making homemade we learn ways to stretch what we have when we have the important basic items in our kitchen to make meals.
So we must budget for these things. I feel the way people shop today is indulgent. What I see in grocery buggies many times are not necessary items. Many of us cannot afford these unnecessary items and if we have the real and basic items we can make those indulgent items from time to time as they did in the past. I used to think that my grandparents ate cake often because we would have cake during my generation. But to many people cake was a very special event as would have been other desserts. Cheese would have been a very rare item in many homes as my relatives told me.
Pies were a bit more common because of fruit that would be seasonally and a little flour, sugar and butter would become a fruit or nut pie. Sometimes it was buttermilk pie, sweet potato pie. It was whatever was avalable or leftover.
If things get more difficult than they are now, the healthy diets that so many are on now will not be afforded or possibly even found in the stores as they are now. When we need food, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.
We can learn to live with less than we do and do a major cut to our electric and water bills. I am not saying less "Stuff", just less that cost money to use.
Long ago they never had what we have now so they did not have the expenses we have. They did not even have electricity or running water and with that there were not appliances. They did have wood, coal and fuel stoves, they did have candles and kerosene or oil expenses but they were very careful for what they used and when it got dark, it was time to go to bed.
For those of us that need to know how to get through financial difficulties, to keep a roof over our head there are many things we can dump right away if it causes a bill to come in. Never be too proud to not dump the things that we cannot afford.
If you can afford, turn your lawn into a garden. It does not have to be in pots as we have, our neighbors in their 90's would dig a hole each time they had scraps and they would bury the scraps and move on to the next spot and that is where the next years garden would be.
Learn how to is a huge thing, today we can learn how to do things ourselves easily because it is online or at the library. We must learn skills to navigate this time we live in.
What I am saying in this post is be smart, consider the what if's and do what is needed. I do not have the answers, I have concerns when I realized that we do not have today what we need to survive a very difficult time as our ancestors and this is mostly due to less small farms, less bartering, less people gardening. We can dump expenses and do without but we need more than this. I am hoping that in the forum on this blog we can put our ideas together.
We need to be realistic that todays time we are not prepared to live as our generations before us did so do we need to bring back the victory gardens now? What other things we can think up to help navigate these times that could get uncomfortable.
I hope to see you in the forum. You can read the forum and not sign up, signing up is just helps us to keep scammers out of our forum.
Grandma Donna
