How I Got This Way

The rule of that house was simple, and it was never once spoken out loud, because it didn't need to be: you never bought a thing you could make, fix, or preserve yourself.

My mother could feed six people through a hard winter out of that cellar — shelves of beans and tomatoes she'd put up in August, potatoes in a crate of sand, apples wrapped in newspaper. Her arithmetic wasn't done on paper. It was done in jars. My grandmother taught her, and the two of them taught me: how to keep a house dry, how to make things last, how to look at a problem twice before you ever spent a nickel on it. When the creek flooded the low field, or the snow came early, nobody in that hollow called somebody. You fixed it, or a neighbor helped you fix it, and you helped them back come spring.

I married my Walter and kept our own home for forty-one years the same way — garden, canning kettle, cast iron, and a healthy suspicion of anything advertised too loudly. When Walter got sick, I learned a second education the hard way: what doctoring costs, what insurance doesn't say, and how many programs exist to help older folks that nobody ever mentions until you find them yourself — usually a year later than you needed them. I promised myself I'd mention them. Loudly. To everybody.

These days it's my granddaughter Katie who aims me at the modern world — she set the camera up, she reads me your comments at Sunday dinner, and she taught me that “an app” is not something you eat before supper. Between her screens and my jars, we manage.

That's what my ebooks are: the two educations put together. The Forgotten Homestead Handbook is what my mother knew — keeping a home clean, dry, and pest-free on almost no money. Senior Savings Secrets is what Walter's illness taught me — claiming every discount, benefit, and program you're owed.