Reply #98: You really are planning ahead! [View All]

[tenshi816]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have a DU group about stuff like this, a kind of "preparing for the inevitable" forum.

I remember when I was a young woman discovering an old copy of the original Whole Earth Catalog and later the Foxfire series of books. They intrigued me even then because I always liked the idea of self-sufficiency (and even though I fell way, way away from that path as I grew older, I've now started making my way back to it).

My family has occupied the same area of NE Georgia since the late 1700s and until the last generation were always farming people; even when my parents were growing up, they were from largely self-sufficient households. Their families ate the animals they raised or hunted themselves, grew their own fruit and vegetables, knitted, made their own clothes, drank milk fresh from the cow, ground corn and wheat for cornmeal and flour, and made their own butter. Water came from the well and my grandparents still had a wood stove in the 1970s (and never had a phone before 1975). My grandmother was into herbal remedies before it was cool, and grew her own flowers and herbs to use. My grandfather even made whiskey, although that's a path probably best avoided. My grandmother canned fruits and vegetables to eat in the winter, and made all her own preserves. A trip "to town" was a big deal, and even then it was to buy non-food items (they were good at a lot of things, but didn't make their own shoes or laundry detergent!).

When I was growing up we lived in Atlanta and I was a real city girl, embarrassed by my "country" background. Now I feel altogether differently and while I wouldn't like to go all the way back to basics the way my grandparents lived, I admire them for knowing how to do all the things they did. The sad truth is, if we didn't have the conveniences we have today, many of us wouldn't know how to survive. That really bothers me.