I'm reading Vilhelm Moberg's first novel The Emigrants, the first in a four-book series about Swedes who emigrated to the U.S. and the start of my research for the Story (see my last post). Currently in Moberg's book I'm reading about farmhands in Sweden, who were usually in a year-long contract. Life was brutal.
Reading books about what life was like 150 years ago creates ambivalent feelings in me. On the one hand, I long to be more connected with the earth and daily survival, pre-industrial age. But on the other, I feel grateful for inventions of convenience and human evolution that mean I don't have to spend an entire day doing laundry, or clearing stones or stumps from a field to till it, or suffer persecution because someone who is religiously zealous is spreading rumors about me.
Today Don and I spent time clearing and burning sticks that had fallen in the ice storm, and cutting and stacking wood for the wood stove. Don has a chainsaw, and we only had to do this work for a couple of hours. On the one hand, we got to be connected with the earth and daily survival. And on the other, right now I'm sitting in the family room typing on my laptop with the woodstove supplementing the heat from the gas furnace.
Reading books about what life was like 150 years ago creates ambivalent feelings in me. On the one hand, I long to be more connected with the earth and daily survival, pre-industrial age. But on the other, I feel grateful for inventions of convenience and human evolution that mean I don't have to spend an entire day doing laundry, or clearing stones or stumps from a field to till it, or suffer persecution because someone who is religiously zealous is spreading rumors about me.
Today Don and I spent time clearing and burning sticks that had fallen in the ice storm, and cutting and stacking wood for the wood stove. Don has a chainsaw, and we only had to do this work for a couple of hours. On the one hand, we got to be connected with the earth and daily survival. And on the other, right now I'm sitting in the family room typing on my laptop with the woodstove supplementing the heat from the gas furnace.
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