This is Ella. We didn’t get our first car until 1918. It was a Ford Model T. This photo shows it parked up by our pond for a picnic. Would you believe I was the only one in the family who ever learned to drive? Not my parents, not brother Hal or sister Bessie. So I ended up spending the rest of my life driving everyone else around. With all that driving, though, I was a pretty good driver, if I do say so myself.

In many ways the purchase of that Model-T marked the end of our self-sufficiency. We had to buy gasoline for the car. Couldn’t grow that on the farm. A few years earlier, we installed a furnace in the basement with a gravity-fed hot water heating system. Had to buy coal from a dealer. Couldn’t raise that on the farm. Soon we supplemented the old wood stove in the kitchen with one that burned kerosene. That didn’t grow on the farm. Then, in 1926, we got electricity. Couldn’t grow that on the farm either. About the same time my brother retired from farming. All of a sudden, we had to start buying more of our food. I stopped making my own clothes too. And now we had garbage that we had to take to the dump. No more living sustainably with what we produced on the farm. No more recycling or reusing everything. Life was easier, certainly, but I am not so sure it was better. What do you think?

Our pig house is around the corner to your left. Why don’t you go there next?