One day my wife and I were making a simple picket fence around a small flower garden in the back yard, and our next-door neighbor walked over. He watched admiringly as we fastened pickets to the rails, using a screw gun.
“It must be nice to know how to do things,” he said.
That comment has stuck with us over the years. What could be simpler than going down to the home center and picking up a few boards, sawing them to size and screwing them together to make a picket fence? (Nailing would knock the initially wobbly arrangement out of line.) The whole project would take us just one weekend, including digging postholes, which you can do with a $15 hand tool plus ten minutes per hole. For less than $150 we had a fence for which a professional carpenter would have charged four or five times as much and a fancy fence company would easily charge double again.
And we had the pleasure—largely lost in 21st century America New England winters, we had the still richer experience of imagining our handiwork hidden deep in the snow for weeks or months at a time and of knowing that, like the daffodils, it will re-emerge come spring. It’s a welcome sign of the changing seasons, and we made it ourselves. My wife and I find a simple joy in knowing that we have created this valued element of our personal lives. We bought the raw materials, but the result came from our own hands.
Our neighbor, by contrast, doesn’t seem to do anything around his house except play the stereo on his patio and host the occasional outdoor party. He pays other people to do things for him. There is a constant stream of trucks and vans parked in front of his place—landscapers to put in some shrubs, painters to recoat his nearly new house, carpenters to add a vestibule to his front door. At least once a week, it seems, there is a tradesman parked out front to do something. If we have a dry spell, his new shrubs shrivel up because nobody waters them. But no matter; the landscapers return and put in new ones, maybe even before our neighbor notices. To our way of thinking, he is living in a place that really belongs to other people. He has outsourced his own life.
He has kids, but we rarely see them outside. I’m not sure they even know that amazing creatures live under the rotted logs in the woods behind their house, much less that some others fly to their yard all the way from South America . There are no video games that trade in that knowledge.
To be sure, our neighbor is entitled to his way of doing things. No doubt he finds some pleasure in it. But we know something he doesn’t, and it’s not just that we “know how to do things,” though that’s the source of it. We have discovered a form of satisfaction, a kind of joy in living that our not-too-distant ancestors understood innately even though they never really thought about. In those bygone days it was taken for granted that people knew how to do things, especially the ones who lived in the country or in small towns. They could do many things for themselves—put up pickles, make a wooden bench, sew an apron, even grow prettier and longer-lasting cut flowers than florists sell today. They could make bread, track the seasons by the species of birds in their yards and, if the soup needed a little extra zing, step outside and pull some fresh herbs from their dooryard garden.
Those are things my wife and I have done nearly all our lives. (We’re now in our late 60s.) We had parents and grandparents who came from that self-reliant and yet unassuming era. We absorbed the essence of living our own lives from them. We passed it on to our children. We know there is deep satisfaction in making things and doing things for ourselves.
No doubt you’ve heard about so-called heirloom tomatoes. They’re all the rage in some circles. People pay good money for them at farmers’ markets because they taste so good. But, of course, our grandparents and their ancestors knew all about them. They grew their own, only they weren’t called heirloom. It was only when grocery stores became supermarkets and started stocking tomatoes all year round that most of us stopped growing our own. For a generation or two in the last half of the 20th century, most of us settled for those round, red balls that look like tomatoes but, many of us now realize, don’t taste like tomatoes, not like the real tomatoes of the old days.
This is an interactive Web site (meaning you may post your ideas and suggestions and even whole articles that could help others) about how to make your own picket fence, how to grow your own heirloom tomatoes and how to do much more that recaptures the satisfaction of life that our ancestors took for granted. It’s about how to live your own life by doing things for yourself and your family, things that almost everybody knew how to do back in the old days. If you’ve ever grown your own tomatoes or tasted those that somebody else grew at home or on a nearby farm (they’re not firm enough to be shipped long distances), you know the pleasure that comes from doing something the old fashioned way. This Web site will show you how to gain similar pleasure and satisfaction from a wide variety of other home-based activities.
You’ll learn “how to do things” that will bring you and your family a deeper contentment than anything you could buy or pay somebody else to do for you. There is guidance here on how to bake a loaf of bread (without a bread machine), how to sew an apron, how to build a bookcase or even a reproduction of a classic 18th century five-board bench without a fancy woodshop. You’ll learn how to make grape jelly better than anything you’ll find at the store. There’s even advice on making a quilt that will become a family heirloom and how to grow a summer-long supply of cut flowers for the price of one store-bought bouquet.
These are all things that almost anyone can learn to do. We’ve picked simple projects, tried to write the instructions clearly and, in some cases, developed tips on how to progress to more difficult jobs (for those who are interested). Best of all, by doing these things together as a family, you’ll find not only satisfaction but, if our experience is any guide, a closer bond among you and your loved ones.
If you’re raising kids, this approach to life can have an even greater impact. Judging from the young families that we see around our town, it looks like today’s youngsters no longer know how to play. Oh, they’re whizzes at soccer or ballet or any of the many forms of organized recreation that so many of today’s parents push on their kids, along with all the name-brand clothing and equipment. This kind of play is not something done for fun; these kids are taught to play to win, and the angry parents cheering and jeering from the stands make that clear. And even if “everybody wins,” as is often the case with programs for littler children, the idea is still there that you play to get rewards given by somebody else. It’s a rare kid today who plays for the joy of the activity.
For all our admiration of the “good old days,” we’re not advocating any kind of back-to-the-land extremism. This Web site is for those who are definitely not going to go back to the land or move off the grid. Automobiles and air conditioning, DVDs and cell phones are here to stay, and we’re happy to have them. We couldn’t get along without our computer and Internet hook-up. Our TiVo makes television fit into our schedule. All we’re saying that it’s possible to partake of both realms—the most modern and the most self reliant.
If you’ve flipped through, or even read cover-to-cover, the Foxfire series, you’re probably already in tune with our message. In the “olden days” most people knew how to do these things. Foxfire is a wonderful series, an homage to the ordinary people who knew how to live for themselves, and we highly recommend it. But, as we implied earlier, most of those activities no longer make sense for the vast majority of us in the industrialized world.
Perhaps you already have tasted the satisfaction in doing for yourself. Maybe you’ve looked for books to help you do more but all you can find are single-specialty how-to books that go into far more detail than you want or need on just one topic. Those are great if you find a specialized activity in which you want to develop your skill. But if you just want to explore the range of possibilities, we are here for you. We’ll get you started in all of the major areas of everyday life where a little guidance and a little practice can deliver a large reward. You’ll come to think of your house as much more than a place to eat and sleep. Your home will become a homestead, even if it’s just a city lot, a refuge where you and your family enjoy spending time because you will have made it your own.
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