Then I learned of a dinner prepared for guests in the mountains of Albania1 to which the neighbors were bidden. The food was coarse cornbread, made without leavening, sweet and nutty and so precious that the tiniest crumb, if dropped on the floor or table, must be picked up, kissed and the sign of the cross made over it, lean pork, stripped of every scrap of fat, broiled on sticks over the fire.
In Albania it is etiquette to leave a great deal of the food and it was sent away while the guests were still hungry. Then a wooden bowl filled with cubes of fat pork fried crisp was brought. This was also removed before hunger was satisfied and water was brought for washing the hands. The stranger guests ate first, then the neighbors ate and after them, the family who entertained.
“In Albania it is not good manners to show eagerness for food,” said the guide, “Albanians are not greedy.”
As a Farm Woman Thinks (6)
February 1, 1922
A wonderful way has been invented to transform a scene on the stage, completely changing the apparent surroundings of the actors and their costumes without moving an article. The change is made in an instant. By an arrangement of light and colors the scenes are so painted that with a red light thrown upon them, certain parts come into view while other parts remain invisible. By changing a switch and throwing a blue light upon the scene, what has been visible disappears and things unseen before appear, completely changing the appearance of the stage.
This late achievement of science is a good illustration of a fact we all know but so easily forget or overlook—that things and persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.
When we are down-hearted and discouraged, we speak of looking at the world thru blue glasses; nothing looks the same to us; our family and friends do not appear the same; our home and work show in the darkest colors. But when we are happy, we see things in a brighter light and everything is transformed.
How unconsciously we judge others by the light that is within ourselves, condemning or approving them by our own conception of right and wrong, honor and dishonor! We show by our judgment just what the light within us is.
What we see is always affected by the light in which we look at it so that no two persons see people and things alike. What we see and how we see depends upon the nature of our light.
A quotation, the origin of which I have forgotten, lingers in my mind: “You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window thru which you must see the world.”2
As a Farm Woman Thinks (7)
March 1, 1922
Officially, winter is over and spring is here. For most of us, it has been a hard winter, despite the fact that the weather has been pleasant the greater part of the time. There are things other than zero weather and heavy snow falls that make hard winters.
But we know all about those things and so I’ll tell you of something else— something as warming to the heart as a good fire on the hearth is to a chilled body on a cold day.
I often have thought that we are a little old-fashioned here in the Ozark hills; now I know we are, because we had a “working” in our neighborhood this winter. That is a blessed, old-fashioned way of helping out a neighbor.
While the winter was warm, still it has been much too cold to be without firewood and this neighbor, badly crippled with rheumatism, was not able to get up his winter’s wood; with what little wood he could manage to chop, the family scarcely kept comfortable.
So the men of the neighborhood gathered together one morning and dropped in on him. With cross-cut saws and axes they took possession of his wood lot. At noon a wood saw was brought in and it sawed briskly all the afternoon; by night there was enough wood ready for the stove to last the rest of the winter.
The women did their part, too. All morning they kept arriving with well filled baskets and at noon a long table was filled with a country neighborhood dinner.
After the hungry men had eaten and gone back to work, the women and children gathered at the second table, fully as well supplied as the first, and chatted pleasant neighborhood gossip while they leisurely enjoyed the good things. Then when the dishes were washed, they sewed, knit and crocheted and talked for the rest of the afternoon.
It was a regular old-fashioned, good time and we all went home with the feeling expressed by a new-comer when he said, “Don’t you know I’m proud to live in a neighborhood like this, where they turn out and help one another when it’s needed.”
“Sweet are the uses of adversity” when it shows us the kindness in our neighbors’ hearts.
As a Farm Woman Thinks (8)
March 15, 1922
Reading of an agricultural conference in Washington, I was very much interested in the address of Mrs. Sewell of Indiana on the place of the farmer’s wife in agriculture. She drew a pathetic picture, so much so as to bring tears to the eyes of the audience.
Now I don’t want any tears shed over my position, but I’ve since been doing some thinking on the farm woman’s place and wondering if she knows and has taken the place that rightfully belongs to her.
Every good farm woman is interested as much in the business part of farm life as she is in the housework and there comes a time, after we have kept house for years, when the housekeeping is mostly mechanical, while the outside affairs are forever changing, adding variety and interest to life.
As soon as we can manage our household to give us the time, I think we should step out into this wider field, taking our place beside our husbands in the larger business of the farm. Co-operation, mutual help and understanding are the things that will make farm life what it should be.
And so, in these days of women’s clubs from which men are excluded, and men’s clubs that permit women to be honorary members only, I’m glad to know of a different plan whereby farm men and women work together on equal terms and with equal privileges. To a woman who has been an “auxiliary” until she is tired of the word, it seems like a start toward the promised land.
Nowhere in the constitution or by-laws of this club is any distinction made between men and women members. Meetings are held once a month at homes of members and are all day sessions. The morning is devoted to business of the club and a program. After dinner comes an inspection of farm, garden and stock and the day ends with music and discussion.
The men are interested and take part in the indoor program and the women assist in the inspection of the farm.
As in Days of Old
April 15, 1922
It is curious how nearly alike are the instructions given farmers in the year 1730, in the land of the “Heathen Chinee” and the advice given by our agricultural teachers to the farmers today.
“The preparation of the seedbed is most important,” I have just read in one of our farm papers. “When the plowing is ended, the entire plot is broken up with the iron-toothed harrow. The harrow has the effect of making the soil fine, so that the seeds can send roots into it. Therefore people say: ‘Fine harrowing is the completion of the work’.” This sounds as tho I might still be quoting from our farm paper, but instead it is from the commentaries on the “Pictures of Plowing and Weaving” written by order of the Emperor Chien Lung nearly 200 years ago.
As reproduced in “Asia,” these old pictures and the commentaries on them are very interesting and in one particular they are a model of good farm articles—they are so very plain, simple yet comprehensive, covering the entire process of the work in so few words.
As an instance consider this note under the picture of sowing in the old Chinese book.
“When the ground is entirely prepared, the watered seeds are placed in a 10-quart vessel. This is suspended from the left elbow, while the right hand takes out the seeds and scatters them. The seeds are sown, the sower always going forward, about a handful to three steps. For a mou of land, one needs 3 quarts of seeds. The most important thing in sowing is evenness so that the shoots will not be too close nor too far
apart.”
Could more full, yet concise and simple directions for the work be given? Following them an inexperienced farmer could make no mistake, tho they do rather remind me of a recipe for cooking I once read which said to “mix the ingredients in a yellow bowl.”
These pictures, each with its footnote minutely describing the pictured process, cover the season’s work in the raising of rice and the making of silk, from the beginning to the completion, and the last is a picture of the Thanksgiving service. The footnote reads: “When the work in the field is finished and the innumerable treasures have been gathered, the protection of the Divinity must not be forgotten.”
And so, after the harvest, Thanksgiving was celebrated those hundreds of years ago, in far away China, while not with our own observances still with the same thankfulness of heart.
Curious is it not that down thru the centuries there should be so little change and strange that the minds of such different peoples should run so nearly in the same channels?
But nature’s processes continue in the same way, giving of the bounties of the earth to those who labor understandingly wherever their home may be and the Chinese farmers, like ourselves, work hard thru the season and thank God for the harvest. And it is a pleasant thought that when we get acquainted we find our neighbor nations, like our farmer neighbors, to be pretty good folks after all despite their peculiarities.
As a Farm Woman Thinks (9)
May 1, 1922
Some small boys went into my neighbor’s yard this spring and with sling shots, killed the wild birds that were nesting there. Only the other day, I read in my daily paper of several murders committed by a 19-year-old boy.
At once there was formed a connection in my mind between the two crimes, for both were crimes of the same kind, tho perhaps in differing degree—the breaking of laws and the taking of life cruelly.
For the cruel child to become a hard-hearted boy and then a brutal man is only stepping along the road on which he has started. A child allowed to disobey without punishment is not likely to have much respect for law as he grows older. Not that every child who kills birds becomes a murderer nor that everyone who is not taught to obey goes to prison.
The Bible says, if we “train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it.”3 The opposite is also true and if a child is started in the way he should not go, he will go at least some way along that road as he grows older. It will always be more difficult for him to travel the right way even tho he finds it.
The first laws with which children come in contact are the commands of their parents. Few fathers and mothers are wise in giving these, for we are all so busy and thoughtless. But I am sure we will all agree that these laws of ours should be as wise and as few as possible, and, once given, children should be made to obey or shown that to disobey brings punishment. Thus they will learn the lesson every good citizen and every good man and woman learns sooner or later—that breaking a law brings suffering.
If we break a law of nature we are punished physically; when we disobey God’s law we suffer spiritually, mentally and usually in our bodies also; man’s laws, being founded on the ten commandments, are really mankind’s poor attempt at interpreting the laws of God and for disobeying them there is a penalty. The commands we give our children should be our translation of these laws of God and man, founded on justice and the law of love, which is the Golden Rule. And these things enter into such small deeds. Even insisting that children pick up and put away their playthings is teaching them order, the law of the universe, and helpfulness, the expression of love.
The responsibility for starting the child in the right way is the parents’— it can not be delegated to the schools nor the state, for the little feet start on life’s journey from the home.
As a Farm Woman Thinks (10)
June 15, 1922
Gnawing away at the mountains of shale near Denver, is a machine that eats rocks, transforming them into oil, paraffin, perfumes, dyes, synthetic rubber—in all 155 different products, including gasoline and lubricating oils. The separating of the shale rock into these elements is done by heat generated by oil burners, and there is absolutely no waste, for the refuse, dumped out at the back of the machine is made up of hydro-carbons of great commercial value.
The story of this rock eating monster is worthy of a place with the tales brought to Europe by travelers in India who first saw cotton and sugar cane. They told that in that strange land were “plants that bore wool without sheep and reeds that bore honey without bees.”
The first cotton cloth brought to Europe came from Calicut and was called calico. Only kings and queens could afford to wear it.
Arabs brought the lumps of sweet stuff, like gravel, that they called “sukkar.” This was so scarce and precious in Europe that it was prescribed as medicine for kings and queens when they were ill.
From the days when sugar and cotton were such wonders to the time when a machine crushes rocks and from them distils delicate perfumes and beautiful colors has not been so very long when measured by years, but measured by the advance of science and invention it has been a long, long way. Looking forward, we stand in awe of the future wondering if the prophecy of Berthelot, the great French chemist will be fulfilled. He says the time will come when man by the aid of chemistry, will take his food from the air, the water and the earth without the necessity of growing crops or killing living creatures; when the earth will be covered with grass, flowers and woods among which mankind will live in abundance and joy.
This is far in the future and almost impossible of belief, but that which is the wonder of one age and hardly believable is the commonplace of the next. We go from achievement to achievement, and no one knows the ultimate heights the human race may reach.
As a Farm Woman Thinks (11)
July 1, 1922
My neighbor, who came from a city where her husband worked for a salary, said to me, “It is difficult for any one who has worked for wages to get used to farming. There is a great difference between having a good pay check coming twice a month, or having only the little cash one can take in on a small farm. Why we have scarcely any money at all to spend!”
“You spent the paycheck for your living expenses did you not,” I asked?
“All of it,” she answered. “Every bit! We never could save a cent of it.”
“And you have your living now, off the farm,” said I.
“Yes and a good one,” she replied, “with a little left over. But it was great fun spending the pay check. If we’d had a little less fun, we might have had more left.”
All of which brings us to the question the little girl asked: “Would you rather have times or things”—good times to remember or things to keep, like bank accounts, homes of our own and such things?
Things alone are very unsatisfying. Happiness is not to be found in money or in houses and lands, not even in modern kitchens or a late model motor car. Such things add to our happiness only because of the pleasant times they bring us.
But times would be bad without some things. We can not enjoy ourselves if we are worried over how we shall pay our bills, or the taxes, or buy what the children need.
And so we must mix our times and things, but let’s mix ’em with brains, as the famous artist said he mixed his paints, using good judgment in the amount we take.
How the Findleys Invest Their Money
These Missouri Parents Figure That Education of Their Boys and Girls Pay Bigger Dividends Than Pretty Clothes and Frivolous Pastimes
August 1, 1922
“We are putting what we earn into our children’s minds, instead of into houses and clothes,” said little Mrs. Findley as she smoothed the hair of small Ben who leaned against her knee. “We think it a better investment.”
“Oh yes, my husband agrees with me! He didn’t at first. He said we couldn’t educate the children because we were poor, but now he is as ambitious for them as I am.”
“Tell me
about it,” I said and this is the story she told me as we sat on the shady porch one pleasant afternoon.
“When I was a child we lived back in the woods and father was poor. My own mother was dead and while my stepmother did the best she could for me, there were smaller children to take care of and always so much to do. Father wanted me to go to school, but when I was needed at home to help, he could never see any other way but that I must stay and work. Then, too, he hadn’t money to buy my school books.
IT WAS AN UPHILL PULL
“When I was twelve years old, my brother and I chopped a load of wood, hauled it to town and sold it for money to buy a grammar and history. We hacked the wood up some, but we got it into sticks and we got the books.
“It was that way when I needed the first book for my children, Glen and Joette; there was no money to buy the book, so I took in a washing and got the money. I’ve always been ashamed of that work. It was not well done, because I was in such poor health that I had to hold myself up by the tub while I scrubbed, but that book just had to come and it came.
“You see, after I married, we lived in Joplin and my husband worked in the mines. Jess had been earning $4.50 a day but it took it all to live, so when we came back to the hills we had only our bare hands.
“Well, I started the children to work in their new book and every day we had lessons. I taught them first a word, then the letters in it and they had them ready for use in another word. When they learned a name, I showed them the object; when they learned an action word, we acted it; for instance, when they read the word ‘jump’ we jumped and how they did enjoy saying their lessons to daddy in the evening, especially when he’d let them beat him.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist Page 35