Quotable Sundays - Overcoming Difficulty

(From Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection)

After all, what is a difficulty but a direct challenge? "Here I am in your way," it says, "you cannot get around me nor overcome me! I have blocked your path!" Anyone of spirit will accept the challenge and find some way to get around or over, or through that obstacle.

(Overcoming Our Difficulties)

Quotable Sundays - Having A Cheerful House

(From Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection)

"I spent an afternoon a short time ago with a friend in her new home. The house was beautiful and well furnished with new furniture but it seemed bare and empty to me. I wondered why this was until I remembered my experience in my new house. I could not make the living room seem homelike. I would move the chairs here and there and change the pictures on the wall, but something was lacking. Nothing seemed to change the feeling of coldness and vacancy that displeased me whenever I entered the room.

Then, as I stood in the middle of the room one day wondering what I could possibly do to improve it, it came to me that all that was needed was someone to live in it and furnish it with the everyday, pleasant thoughts of friendship and cheerfulness and hospitality.

We all know there is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals. This spirit meets us at the door as we enter the home.

If the members of a home are ill-tempered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short. If they are kindly, generous, good-tempered people, you will have a feeling of warmth and welcome that will make you wish to stay. Sometimes you feel that you must be very prim and dignified and at another place you feel a rollicking good humor and a readiness to laugh and be merry.

Each individual has a share in making this atmosphere of the home what it is, but the mother can mold it more to her wish. I read a piece of poetry several years ago supposed to be a man speaking of his wife and this was the refrain of the little story:

I love my wife because she laughs,
Because she laughs and doesn't care.

I'm sure that it would have been a delightful home to visit, for a good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing. And this woman was the embodied spirit of cheerfulness and good temper.

Let us be cheerful! We have no more right to steal the brightness out of the day for own family than we have to steal the purse of a stranger. (Emphasis added.) Let us be as careful that our homes are furnished with pleasant happy thoughts as we are that the rags are the right color and texture and the furniture comfortable and beautiful!

("Thoughts Are Things")

Quotable Sunday

From Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection:

"Dr. Wiley, the food expert, states that drugs, drink and worry are making us a nation of nervous wrecks, and declares that practically every man and woman are at some time in their lives on the verge of insanity. Outdoor life is the remedy he suggests as the best cure for this condition."

(Outdoor Life the Remedy)

More from Laura: About Gardening Sort Of, But Not Really

Now is the time to make a garden! Anyone can be a successful gardener at this time of year and I know of no pleasanter occupation these cold, snowy days, than to sit warm and snug by the fire making garden with pencil, in a seed catalog. What perfect vegetables do we raise in that way and so many of them! Our radishes are crisp and sweet, our lettuce tender and our tomatoes smooth and beautifully colored. Best of all, there is not a bug or worm in the whole garden and the work is so easily done.

It is so much easier to plan that it is to accomplish. When I started my small flock of Leghorns a few years ago, a friend inquired as to the profits of the flock and taking my accounts as a basis, he figured I would be a millionaire within five years. The five years are past, but alas, I am still obliged to be economical. There was nothing wrong with my friend figuring, except that he left out the word "if" and that made all the difference between profits figured out on paper and those worked out by actual experience.

My Leghorns would have made me a millionaire - if the hens had produced according to schedule; if the hawks had loved field mice better than chickens; if I had been so constituted that I never became weary, if prices - but why enumerate? Because allowance for that word "if" was not made in the figuring, the whole result was wrong.

It is necessary that we dream now and then. No one ever achieved anything from the smallest object to the greatest, unless the dream was dreamed first, yet those who stop at dreaming never accomplish anything. . . But the dream is only the beginning. We'd starve to death if we went no further with that garden than making it by the fire in the seed catalog. It takes judgement to plant the seeds at the right time, in the right place, and hard digging to make them grow, whether in the vegetable garden or in the garden of our lives.

- Laura Ingalls Wilder, "Make Your Dreams Come True", Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection

Being Thankful

I have a couple of posts in the works, including my December Themes one, but until I get them done, here's another quote from Laura. ("Thanksgiving Time" from Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection.)
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Father had laid in a supply of provisions for the winter and among them were salt meats, but for fresh meat we depended on father's gun and the antelope which fed, in herds, across the prairie. So we were quite excited, one day near Thanksgiving, when Father hurried into the house for his gun and then away to try for a shot at a belated flock of wild geese hurrying south.

We would have roast goose for Thanksgiving dinner! "Roast goose and dressing seasoned with sage," said sister Mary. "No, not sage! I don't like sage and we won't have it in the dressing," I exclaimed. Then we quarreled, until Father returned, - without the goose! To this day, when I think of it I feel again just as I felt then and realize how thankful I would have been for roast goose.

This little happening has helped me be properly thankful even tho at times the seasoning of my blessings has not been such as I would have chosen. (Amen to that, Laura!)

"I suppose I should be thankful for what we have, but I can't feel very thankful when I have to pay $2.60 for a little flour and the price still going up," writes a friend, and in the same letter she says, "we are in our usual health." The family are so used to good health that it is not even taken into consideration as a cause for thanksgiving. We are so inclined to take for granted the blessings we posses and to look for something peculiar; some special good luck for which to be thankful. We are nearly all afflicted with mental farsightedness and so easily overlook the thing which is obvious and near.
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Super, like many young children, has a tendency to list in his prayers many obvious things that he is thankful for (the sky, the dog, our house, his fire trucks) and I think that young children, as usual, are more in tune with the true meaning of things.

How to get happiness - according to Laura

(Taken from "Favors the Small Farm Home" in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection. This was Laura's first published article, originally written as an address to a local farmer's club meeting. On this occasion, though, she was too busy to give the speech herself, and so she sent the text along for someone else to read. The editor of the Missouri Ruralist was in the audience, and liked what he heard. He decided to publish the article, and got in touch with Laura. And so her life as a writer began.)

"There is a movement in the United States today, wide-spread, and very far reaching its consequences. People are seeking after a freer, healthier, happier life. They are tired of the noise and dirt, bad air and crowds of the cities and are turning longing eyes toward the green slopes, wooded hills, pure running water and health-giving breezes of the country.

A great many of those people are discouraged by the amount of capital required to buy a farm and hesitate at the thought of undertaking a new business. But there is no need to buy a large farm. A small farm will bring in a good living with less work and worry and the business is not hard to learn . . . I am an advocate of the small farm and I want to tell you how an ideal home can be made on, and a good living made from, five acres of land.

Whenever a woman's homemaking is spoken of, the man in the case is presupposed and the woman's home-making is expected to consist in keeping the house clean and serving good meals on time, etc. In short, that all her home-making should be inside the house. It takes more than the inside of the house to make a pleasant home and women are capable of making the whole home, outside and in, if necessary. She can do so to perfection on a five-acre farm by hiring some of the outside work done. However, our ideal home should be made by a man and woman together. First I want to say that a five-acre farm is large enough for the support of a family. [A] great part of the living can be made on that size farm from poultry or fruit or a combination of poultry, fruit and dairy.

It used to be that the woman on a farm was isolated and behind the times. Now rural delivery brings us our daily papers . . . The telephone gives us connection with the outside world at all times . . . Circulating libraries are scattered through the rural districts . . . The interurban trolley lines being built throughout the country will make it increasingly easy for us to run into town for an afternoon's shopping or any other pleasure.

Yes, indeed, things have changed in the country and we have the advantages of city life if we care to take them. Besides we have what it is impossible for the woman in the city to have. We have a whole five acres for our backyard and all outdoors for our conservatory, filled not only with beautiful flowers, but with grand old trees as well, with running water and beautiful birds, with sunshine and fresh air and all wild, free beautiful things.

The children, instead of playing with other children in some street or alley can go make friends with the birds, on their nests in the bushes, as my little girl used to do. This little farm home is a delightful place for friends to come for afternoon tea under the trees."

I would so love a little five-acre farm home. It is my goal. I'm hoping to have one in the next five years. I hope that all of my friends will come out and have some of the eggs, fruit, and milk from the Simple Farm and spend some afternoons under the trees. Until then, I'll try and find ways to be as self-reliant as we can, and get out in nature as often as we can, and be as happy as I can here in the city.

Time Management Lesson from Laura

From "Make Every Minute Count" in Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection -

"There are just now so many things that must be done that we are tempted to
spend ourselves recklessly, especially as it is rather difficult to decide what
to eliminate, and we cannot possibly accomplish everything. We must
continually be weighing and judging and discarding things that are presented to
us, if we would save ourselves, and spend our time and strength only on those
that are important. We may be called upon to spend our health and strength
to the last bit, but we should see to it that we do not waste them.

'Oh I am so tired that I just want to sit down and cry,' a friend confided
in me, 'and here is the club meeting on hand and the ledge practice and the Rod
Cross work day and the aid society meeting and the supper at the school house
and the spring sewing and garden and - Oh! I don't see how I'm ever going to get
thru with it all!'

Of course she was a little hysterical. It didn't all have to be done
at once, but it showed how over-tired she was and it was plain that something must
give way-if nothing else, herself. My friend needed a little open space in
her life."

I need to remember to have a little open space in my life too.

More from Laura

From "A Bouquet of Flowers"

The little white daisies with their hearts of gold grew thickly along the path where we walked to Sunday School. Father and sister and I used to walk the 2 1/2 miles every Sunday morning. The horses had worked hard all week and must rest this one day so with Father and Sister Mary I walked to the church thru the beauties of the sunny spring Sundays. I have forgotten what I was taught on those days also. I was only a little girl, you know. But I can still plainly see the grass and the trees and the path winding ahead, flecked with sunshine and shadow and the beautiful golden-hearted daisies scattered all along the way.

Ah well! That was years ago and there have been so many changes since then that it would seem such simple things should be forgotten, but at the long last I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

So the title of my blog isn't what I was originally going to call it

I was originally going to call this blog - Blame It On Laura. As in Ingalls Wilder. I was a HUGE fan of the books and then the show (yes, I'm definitely old enough to remember the show). It always bothered me that the show didn't stay true to the books, and Flower made a similar comment the other day, so apparently I'm not the only one who gets bothered by things like that. :)

Anyway, Flower started reading the Little House books a couple of years ago. One year for Christmas, she asked for the Little House Cookbook. Her lovely Aunt Lisa and her family gave it to her. She looked at it for days, and we cooked a few of the things in the book, and then she couldn't find the book. She finally asked me about it, and I told her that I was reading it. She said "Because you are looking for more recipes for us to try?" I said "Well, yes, but I'm also reading it because I find it really interesting to see how they cooked back then, and what they used, and how they used food that was in season and things like that." She looked at me a little funny, but just said "Well, give it back pretty soon, o.k?" I promised that I would. And I did.

But from that time on, I really started to become interested in cooking and eating more naturally (Sorry Laura, I do draw the line at lard, but I try to eat whole foods and things locally and organically and in season.) I decided to start storing food and other necessary items, but I knew that I didn't have the space or the money to have a large supply. I started with trying to have two weeks of the food that we eat on hand, and now, I have three months of most things, with the exception of eggs, milk and fresh produce.

Then after a few months of trying to live like this, a friend gave me a book called "Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Family Collection." This book is a collection of articles written by Laura for the Missouri Ruralist, a widely-read farm paper, between 1911 and 1918. They talk about what she thought about and how she lived. I read this book in one sitting, and then again more slowly, and a third time to pick out the quotes that I loved.

After reading this, I knew that I wanted to try and live a more simple, more self-sufficient life, and it was when my journey toward simple living really began.

So in this post, and whenever I feel like it LOL, I'll include little snippets of articles that spoke to me. If they don't speak to you, well, skip 'em. :)

From "Doing Our Best":

I am proud of Marian because she is not a quitter; because she can take
disappointment without a whimper and go bravely ahead with her undertakings even
tho things do not always work out as she would like. I am sure, as the
years pass, Marian will answer perfectly that good, old description of a lady,
"Still mistress of herself tho china fall."

Marian failed to send her application in time to become a member of the
Ruralist Poultry Club, but she is hustler nevertheless and should not be classed
as being too slow to win in the race for membership. It was not really her
fault, for the Missouri Ruralist does not come to her home, so she had not read
about the club and as she is a little girl, only 10 years old, I did not tell
her of the club until I had spent some time telling older girls about it.
You see she did not have a fair start.

When she received word that the club membership was complete and her
application was too late, the least that might have been expected was a crying
spell, but not this little girl! She sat still a moment and then said
quietly: "Well, I'm going ahead just the same. Maybe some of the other
girls will drop out and there will be a place for me, anyway I'll be learning
how."

Doing the best we can is all that could be expected of us in any case, but
did you ever notice how hard it is to do our best if we allow ourselves to
become discouraged? It is so easy to slump a little when we can give the
blame to circumstances. I think Marian has found the way to overcome this
by being so busy with mind and muscle at the work in hand that there is no
thoughts of failure or for bemoaning our hard luck."