Simple Sunday: Ruminations

I spent a few minutes this morning reading from one of my favorite childhood books, one called Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

As I start to write this blog, it occurs to me that I usually write about the same sort of things that Wilder did. She focused a lot on the natural world around her, and she wrote about family, farming, growing and preserving food, etc.

Her family butchered hogs, smoked venison, and salted down barrels of fish, enough to last through the winter. They stored root vegetables in a cellar.

Her "sustainable" lifestyle was common for the era in which she grew up.

Yesterday, my family butchered more than 30 chickens.  We didn't have to smoke or salt cure them, because we have the easier option of bagging the birds and sticking them in the deep freeze.

We don't have to do this.  Lord knows it would be much easier and less messy to go to the grocery store and buy chicken.

But the more we learn about super market food supplies, the better home-grown sounds.

Laura Ingalls Wilder was a newspaper columnist after she grew up, got married and moved out of the big woods.

I have a book of her columns that I enjoy dipping into every now and then. The book is called Little House in the Ozarks, and it's mostly filled with short essays Wilder wrote between the years of 1911 and 1925.

She was concerned about how cars and highways were changing her world. She wrote about conserving the trees, and other environmental issues of her day.  She wrote how women's lives were becoming easier because of inventions like the washing machine and refrigerator.

Approximately one hundred years later, Wilder would be amazed at the ways the world has changed.
We have so much less work to do to maintain a household, yet we seem to be far busier.

One of the ways I prepare for a front-loaded work week when I have zero time to cook on Mondays and Tuesdays is to prepare something that will be good to reheat for supper in the following days.

Today, on a simple and quiet Sunday at home, I fried one of those plump big roosters we "dressed" yesterday.
I made potato soup with veggies from our garden, and I baked cornbread and made a blackberry cobbler from berries picked on nearby hillsides a summer or two ago.

I wrote a little blog post and clicked "publish,"and my thoughts went swirling out into cyberspace.

Laura Ingalls Wilder never saw that coming, I'll bet.

I wonder what the next generation of pioneer women journalists will be opining about?

It's hard to imagine, but I'll bet they'll still have to eat.