Thursday, September 2, 2010

More 1900

I am still thinking about this subject. Staci mentioned Frontier House, that PBS produced a few years ago. I loved that show! It certainly brought out the best and a lot of the worst in people, LOL!

As a people, we are so used to everything being right at our fingertips. I remember that as a child, I thought it was bothersome to have to 'look-up' a subject in an encyclopedia. Now, all we do is type in the subject and resources appear before our eyes. I'll confess to loving the ease of the Internet.

When we experienced an ice storm in 2000/2001 (it started Christmas Eve, 2000), we had a little taste of the 1900 experiment. We were without electricity for twelve days. We heat with wood, so we cooked on top of the stove. I have plenty of kerosene lamps and we had kerosene, so we had light. Our well has a sand filter, so we drew water out of the filter--but basically, we were unprepared for a long term black-out. I remember making a list of what would have made our lives better for those couple of weeks, but of course I can't find it!

One history lesson that we all came to understand is why the old-timers went to bed with the chickens~sitting in the dark (because those lamps don't put out much light) makes for a long evening, LOL! We did take turns reading aloud The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That story made us count our blessings!

Thank you all for your comments on the See You in a Hundred Years post!

5 comments:

  1. I never caught that show, wanted too, I wonder if it's on DVD? I emailed you days ago, that link you sent me didn't have the address?

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  2. Oh I remember that ice storm Mary....shivers! That one & then the one around 1997 or was it 1998? It was a bad one too.

    Anyhoo, for those interested, you can watch some clips of the episodes of Frontier House on YouTube.

    Later, Deb

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  3. We had and ice storm about 10 years ago that left us 5 days w/out power and it was over Thanksgiving. All our kids were coming that year. It was fun and we did it and would not have done anything different but boy were we glad when power came back on and we could take showers.

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  4. Loved this post and the previous one too! Back in the blizzard of 93 we were out of power for over a week-it does make you realize how you depend on it for everything.

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  5. That was a wonderful post, Rose Mary! I remember an ice storm we had several years back (might have been the one in 93 like Tipper mentioned) and for being so thankful for our wood burning stove- we had neighbors who almost froze to death because they had no back up heat source. And I had to chuckle about "going to bed with the chickens"- I've heard that all my life, but if you think about it that way, I guess that was why! *giggle*

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