It’s one or two years after an EMP attack and you are safely tucked away in your retreat somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Your storage foods have mostly been used and your high tech electronics is useless. The really bad stuff is mostly past. Now it’s try to stay fed and alive and pray that civilization as you know it is coming back. You’re going to have to work your environment to live. Ever wonder what life might be like to Homestead? What would it really be like to have no running water, electricity, sewer, newspaper or Internet? No supermarket or fire department close at hand?
I have a good imagination but I decided to talk to someone who would know first hand what it was like: my mother. She grew up on a homestead in the middle of Montana during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a two room Cottonwood cabin with the nearest neighbor three miles away. She was oldest, so she was in charge of her brother and sister by the time she was 9 years old. This was her reality; I feel there are lessons here for the rest of us.
There was a Majestic brand cookstove that used wood and coal. The first person up at four thirty A.M., usually her father, would start the fire for breakfast. Then he would go out to take care of the livestock while his wife made breakfast. For the kids, it was a comforting start to the day but your feet would get cold when you got out of bed. There was no sleeping in.Continue reading“Preparedness Lessons from the 1930s – Part 1, by J. E.”
