Still Cold!

(factoring in the wind-chill this morning, it was -54 -- the coldest it's been here in a very long time!)

Something Bunnygirl said in my comments section yesterday set me to thinking. She remarked that people lived in this area years ago, before the advent of electricity and all our modern conveniences, and wondered how they fared. They must have been made of tougher stuff than we are nowadays!

The Bag Lady was fortunate that by the time she was old enough to pay attention, her parents had moved to a city. So the Bag Lady didn’t experience first-hand the hardships of living in the country without the amenities we all take so much for granted now. But the Cowboy (who is a little older than the Bag Lady, tee hee) did grow up without electricity or running water.

His father built a square-timbered house on the land that he homesteaded in the 1940’s, and that house is where the Cowboy grew up. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, square-timbered houses are built of logs cut on all four sides to make them fit together more uniformly. Lots of homesteaders built these kinds of homes – my grandfather built one, too (in 1929) that is still standing, and is just as solid as the day it was built.

Before the advent of electricity and forced-air furnaces, one had to be well-prepared to face a long, cold winter. You had to ensure you had a big pile of dry wood cut and stacked in order to feed your woodstove. You used a woodstove for cooking and for heat. Woe betide the poor homesteader who didn’t lay in his wood supply.

You used your woodstove to melt snow for water, too. Most wood-burning cookstoves had a reservoir somewhere at the back to hold water, so you had a ready supply of hot water.
Having never experienced any of this, these are stories the Bag Lady has heard from her cowboy and his mother. His mother was a tough little woman. She fed cows and took care of all the day-to-day chores of running the farm while her husband was working in a logging camp. She was usually alone for weeks at a time, tending the animals, taking care of her children and keeping everything in working order. She had to make the trek to the dugout that supplied the animalswith drinking water everyday in order to chop an opening in the ice. She chopped wood, carried square bales of hay to the animals morning and night, melted snow for water, did all her cooking on a wood-burning stove, and did laundry by hand, heating the water on the stove.

Storing food was a challenge. Most homes had some form of root cellar where they kept things like potatoes, carrots and onions that they grew in their gardens. Some meat could be stored in an unheated area in the winter. A lot of meat was either canned or salted to preserve it

Life in those days was a lot of hard work. Women worked from sun-up to sun-down. In the winter, they worked to keep the house warm and clean, and to put food on the table; in the summer, they worked in the fields alongside the men, as well as in their gardens, and still worked to keep their homes clean and the meals cooked. They planted their gardens, harvested their gardens and preserved the food from their gardens. They kept a few chickens for eggs, a few pigs, had a milk cow (that had to be milked morning and night) made their own butter, made their own bread, cooked every meal from scratch (no drive-thru at McDonalds!), did laundry by hand on a scrub-board, and in their spare time, did their sewing or knitting or crocheting.

There are probably things that the Bag Lady has forgotten to mention, but that will give you an idea of what our ancestors did in order to stay alive. We should all take a moment to give thanks to all those tough, hard-working pioneer women, without whom this country would never have been settled!