Survive and Thrive

In my travels through the Internet, I found that FEMA had once recommended that citizens keep a three day supply of food and water in their homes.  Then their recommendation was six weeks worth of supplies.  The latest FEMA warning I read says that six months worth of food and water is recommended and they talk about power outages lasting that long.  Do they know something we don't?

We have become a nation of selfish, lazy people.  I wish I had a dime for every time someone has remarked that they wouldn't go to all the work of preserving their own food because they can just buy what they want at the store.  And I might add, pay a whopping price for organic, non GMO food.

People don't know how to do much of anything any more.  Why bother learning the old skills when you can just hire someone else to do the work.  Or push a button on the microwave.  Or Google to find out whatever you want to know.  This got me to thinking about how my grandparents were able to cope in their world without electricity and running water.

At Grandma's farm in northern Minnesota, water was obtained by pumping it into buckets at the hand pump outside the back door and hauling it into the house.  A bucket of drinking water with a dipper in it was kept on a stool in the kitchen by the back door.  If hot water was needed, it was heated in big pots on a wood burning stove.

Meals were cooked and bread was baked in that same wood burning stove in the kitchen.  That meant that Grandma and her daughters needed to know how much wood to use in order to cook food or bake bread but not burn it.  Someone also needed to know how to cut down trees, how to season the wood so it would burn properly and how to cut it up into pieces that would fit in the stove's burn compartment, as well as how to cut kindling to get the fire started.

Grandma didn't have an electric refrigerator, even after the family finally got electricity in the house.  She had a wooden, tin lined ice box.  One door opened to shelves that held the food and another compartment held blocks of ice.  There was a tray below that held the water from the melting ice.

 In the country there were no ice delivery services as there were in the cities.  To get the blocks of ice, in the dead of winter, Grandpa and his sons hitched up a hay wagon to their team of horses and went to a nearby frozen  lake.  They used hand saws to cut through the thick ice and cut the ice into blocks.  They loaded the blocks onto the wagon and drove the team back home.

 A large hole had been dug in the side of the hill behind the house.  It was like a small cave with steps leading down into it and wooden beams shoring up the ceiling and walls.  There was a wooden door installed at ground level that when closed acted like a trap door.  This was their root cellar where potatoes, cabbages, carrots and rutabagas were kept.  It was in this root cellar the blocks of ice were hauled and packed in thick straw, where they remained frozen all summer for use in the ice box.

In the summer, Grandpa and the boys would load a small wood stove onto a wagon.  Grandma would get together food for a few days, canning jars and canning supplies and off the family would go to the blueberry bogs north of their home.  There the kids would pick blueberries and Grandma would can them up in jars using the wood stove for heat.  They slept on quilts under the wagon at night and worked during the day until Grandma had filled all her jars with canned blueberries, usually enough to last a year.  Then they would pack up and go home.

I remember walking to the barn with my Uncle Kenneth when he went to milk the cows by the light of a kerosene lantern.  The fresh milk was run through a hand cranked cream separator, the milk running out a spout into a bucket on one side and the cream on another side.  Grandma would churn much of the cream into butter.

The family kept a huge garden and Grandma canned most of the vegetables, but she stored some of them in the root cellar to have fresh over the winter.  She washed clothes in a wash tub using a washboard and handmade lye soap.  Her clothes dryer was a rope strung between two trees and a bag full of clothespins.  She and her daughters sewed their own clothes as well as shirts for the boys.  They saved chicken feathers to stuff pillows with.  They stuffed mattresses with straw.  They sold eggs and butter to pay for what they couldn't make themselves.  During the Depression, some of the girls taught in rural schools and some of the boys rode freight trains west to earn money on wheat thrashing crews or picking potatoes in Idaho, all of them sending money home to help the family.

Grandma, Grandpa and their nine children not only survived, but thrived because they knew how to do things.  The family had greater importance in their eyes than families seem to today.  I have a hard time envisioning kids today working as hard as my Dad and his siblings did, without complaint, to see that the family had what they needed.  Given the same living conditions, and that's pretty much what we will have if the lights go out for an extended period of time, I have to wonder just how many these days would be able to cope.