I was a city boy, but my wife was a country girl. In our early years while raising young children we learned how to garden and my wife used the skills she had learned from her mother preserving the food we raised. Raising our own food had become a way of life.
After ten years of married life living in the city life we moved to rural Tennessee. For me, it was a huge change, but one that I embraced fully. Sometime during that first year in the rural life, I realized that I had found my home and lifestyle. We were lucky to meet with people that were willing to share their knowledge with us.
I bought a small farm at auction. The house was livable but needed a lot of work. The pastures were fenced and it had a good sturdy barn. The only heat in the house was a large fireplace in the living room. We moved into the house from out of state in the month of January. We had no wood for heat; all we had was a small electric heater.
A neighbor that I had met when I bought the farm at auction showed up the morning after we arrived and announced he was there to help us unload the U-Haul truck. I had talked to the man for five minutes at the auction and here he was ready to spend the day helping us. And he did. He called a friend of his and told him we needed firewood. A couple of hours later a man arrived with a pickup load of firewood and refused payment. He just welcomed us to Tennessee. That kind of thing didn’t happen in the big city.
The man that lived across the road came over and introduced himself. He was a much older man and he informed me that I had bought his family’s old home place and he had been raised in our house. He and his wife turned out to be our best friends, even though they were forty years older than us. We learned so much from these people.
My wife and I spent many hours sitting at their kitchen table drinking coffee and learning what their life had been like. They told us about raising their own food to survive. What they couldn’t raise themselves they traded to get the things they needed, such as something so common as salt. Jack told us about his first alarm clock when they were a young married couple. Jack had to get up early and walk a mile to the country store to catch a ride to town where he worked for the county for twenty-five cents an hour. He didn’t have an alarm clock, so every night he would bring in a rooster and set him on the back of a chair. When the rooster crowed in the morning it was time to get up. One morning the rooster crowed, they got up and his wife made breakfast and Jack walked to the store. When he got there he found he was two hours early. When he got home that evening, he killed the rooster and that was their supper the next day.Continue reading“Reflections of an Aging Prepper, by Wayne Bosak”
