A Humble Beginning

Life on the Dirt Farm, Lebanon, Missouri, about 1932

     Eighty eight years ago (1924) my father and his twin brother - the first in 7 children - were born in Kansas City, Missouri.  Within 4 years two more children were added and the family moved to Pontiac, Michigan where my grandfather secured a job working in a car factory.  As a mother and homemaker, my grandmother had everything she needed to care for her family - running water, a bathroom, lights, an ice box (in those days they didn't have refrigerators), a gas stove & gas heating.  Even a trip to the market was convenient since they lived in town.  But, like most people during that era, everything that they hoped for and dreamed about suddenly came to a screeching halt on October 29, 1929, the day the stock market crashed.

     During the next few months a decision had to be made when the car factory closed.  All around there was mayhem - banks were either foreclosing on mortgages or closing the doors on themselves, people were losing their jobs and their homes. With a family to feed and no prospect of employment, my grandpa packed up his family in his Buick and drove 700 miles to Lebanon, Missouri where his parents lived as sharecroppers.  Shortly upon arrival, my grandpa leased seven acres people called "The Dirt Farm".  Leaving all the comforts & conveniences of a modern home in the city, they now faced life with only an old carriage barn and a borrowed horse drawn plow.  

     With the help of his father and is 3 brothers, my grandpa worked from sun up to sun down converting the barn into a home, expanding one wall for a sleeping area, installing a cast iron cookstove and adding a floor.  My grandma cooked on the woodburning stove, got water from the well and went outside to use the toilet.  Once a week water was drawn and heated and poured into a tub in the house and everyone took their turn bathing in the same water.  In town the grain and seed were purchased and with every sack of grain you got a free baby chick, but those chicks, my grandpa insisted, had to be raised to sell, not to eat.  The boys fished, caught rabbits and frogs for dinner.  Once a week my grandma baked loaves of bread, washed clothes on a scrub board,  worked in the garden and sent her boys to school three miles away with clean shirts, a pencil and a dinner bucket.  Soon, a makeshift barn was constructed and a cow and a couple of hogs were added from either purchase or trade (most probably trade) and my grandpa set out on foot into town to work repairing car radiators for either a pay or trade.  Sometimes he only made a dollar and then he would walk home again, but a dollar was a lot more than most people could get their hands on and if someone else needed it, he would give him half.  By 1933 15 million americans were out of work and my grandmother had another baby.  Yet, life on the dirt farm continued and for my father and his brothers it was an adventure. By late 1936 and another baby, my grandparents left the farm life and drove out to California where their offspring's offspring remain today.

     What does this all have to do with my blog?  Well, for starters it was the inspiration for my trek down frugal lane.  My grandparents life had been inbred in me as I grew up hearing my dad tell about his life on the farm.  As an adult I researched my family history and discovered that many of my ancestors challenges were not unlike our own today.  With this information, I decided that life in my tiny apartment with regular visits from the 5 nearby grandchildren is really no different than life in a one room renovated carriage barn with 6 children (we at least have 2 bedrooms):  Our garden is out back (in a community garden plot); the laundry has to be hauled to wash (about 40 yards from our apartment); we have little money to spend and in order to save we have to make everything from scratch (including grinding wheat & baking bread).  We have an advantage though, we have a bathroom inside, running water, a gas stove, heating & electricity, plus a grocery store nearby.

     Do we still want to find my ten acres?  We do.  Will I blog about it during our search?  I will.  Will I continue to share with those interested how we can manage to overcome todays economic conditions?  I will. And, hopefully, there will be something I've written to inspire just one person in their life.

Until then.... God bless you.

Nancy

Its a Slow Crawl

     Working toward our goal of moving from this tiny apartment to living on our own land is a slow crawl toward our goal.  Especially since we started with a dream and no money.  I feel like the people in the days of Moses when they lingered in the desert for 40 years.  Are we going to give up?  Nope.  Will we ever achieve our dream?  I don't know.  Will we find happiness along the way? We will.
     Last night I was reading about the life of George Albert Smith.  For those of you who know us, we are Mormons and in our lessons at church we learn about the lives & lessons of the Presidents of our church.  In case you don't know, our church is not called the Mormon Church, it is called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the presidents of our church are known to us as Prophets, Seers & Revelators.  This means that they are the mouthpiece for the Lord to guide His people - just like Moses in the desert who was also a Prophet, Seer & Revelator, otherwise the people could not have been lead out of bondage & through the parting of the Red Sea.
     Anyway, I was reading about George Albert Smith & something he said really stood out.  George Albert Smith was born in 1870.  His father & grandfather were stalwart men in the church - very strong members who fulfilled their callings & served the Lord.  George Albert Smith was no different.  Long before he was called to the Presidency of the church - when he was just 22 yrs old - he met the woman he was going to marry.  He told her, "If you are interested in marrying someone for money it would not be me because I have long ago decided that I will not devote myself or my life or my time in making money but toward serving the Lord and toward helping His children in this world."  That didn't mean he wasn't going to work to support his family - what it meant was that his main focus was to serve the Lord first.
     When I read that I thought of Barry & I and wondered how we could live our lives with the same devotion.  I thought of our children & grandchildren & how busy our lives are & how we spend every day from morning to night keeping our tiny apartment organized as we work with the things we have: furniture, clothing, necessities, food storage, crafts, seasonal, ebay business, books, movies, paperwork, etc. etc. etc. & I realized that we should want for nothing else.  If we just took one day & set it aside for service to the Lord how much happiness could we bring to others?
     Maybe our main focus should be on service & put buying land on the back burner.  Maybe serving & searching for land could work simultaneously.  I don't know.  I know that when you serve others, the Lord blesses you with what you need & as you continue to do all that He has ask you to do He will bless you with the desires of your heart.  For Barry & I our desire is to have our children with us as we travel through this earths journey & the hearafter.  Our desire on this earth is to serve others in their needs.  It is to own land that we can expand on & then leave a legacy for our children after we've left this life.
     Buying land is still a hope - a dream - a vision - for us.  Its not so that we can sit upon a hill & show off what we have, but to be able to better live a provident life, one where we are as self-reliant as we possibly can be, one where we can avoid the myriad of manufactured goods, where we can give back to the earth what we've taken from it, where we can feel the sun on our backs as we work the ground, smell the unpolluted air as we hang our clothes on the line, hear the sounds of birds chirping, cows mooing, pigs grunting, or the serenade of the crickets in the evening when we sit outside under the moonlight in awe at the vast expansion of the great & wonderful universe, and when our lives are over & our earthly missions completed, we will have left a piece of Gods green earth to our children so that they too can have their own hopes & dreams & visions.  But, to get their, its a slow crawl.

Thank you

     Thank you my five friends for following our Leavitt Lodge blog.  I hope you find any information that we share useful in some way.  Please, comment if you'd like or email if you'd like.  We'd love to hear from you!

Nancy & Barry

The Leavitt Lodge Newsletter

     Today our newsletters go out.  Eighteen this month.  We started off with seven (7 children) with the first month last May.  By June we thought we'd send one to both Barry & my mothers to keep them updated with our family.  In July & August Barry & I were in St. George, Utah so I added my dear, caring Aunt Shirley to our list.  By September, I thought (hoped) my wonderful sister (Sis) might be interested, so we sent one to her as well.  October came & my loving cousin Ronda said she heard about my newsletters & wanted one.  November I sent an additional to my sweet niece & for December since it was the Christmas month, I thought  my brother would like one.  So, here it is, January & I just thought that I might as well send out 18 & see how it goes.

     I also write a newsletter for the Relief Society in our Ward at church - we make 50 copies & pass them out once a month.  Most of what I've written on my family newsletter is the same on the one for R.S. minus the family news & photos.

     So, here's to those of you who are so kindly following our journey at the Leavitt Lodge.  Here's some insight into who we are, what we believe & how we handle life, including our great and wonderful experience gained by those hard to learn lessons in life.

Part One:

Here in our little Leavitt Lodge we celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary December 4^th with great appreciation for one another.  We surmised that getting remarried later in life has its perks because we’ve discovered things we wished we had learned when we were younger.  One of the main things (& this comes from age & maturity) is to put the other person first:   

We’d like to share with you some of those things we learned:

1.      Always be sensitive to each other’s feelings.

2.      Always communicate.  Ask, “Are you saying ___?”, before you react.  Say, “I’m hurt because ___” when you feel deprived or cheated or ignored.

3.      Hold hands when wherever you go.

4.     Tell yourself your most important job is to make the other happy.  When you do that, you’ll see that happiness comes back to you tenfold.

5.      Serve the other before you serve yourself.

     Being in love is more than attraction, more than having things in common, more than walking the same road together.  Being in love is all those things, of course, plus a commitment to stay in love, to understand each other, giving help, encouraging & supporting each the other in all that you do, sacrificing your own wants, forgiving when forgiveness is hard to come by & taking time out when the pressure gets to much.   We know that as you do those things love will continue to abound & happiness will continue to grow.

 

     Be each other’s present this year & every year after that.  

Step-By-Step

Tea Party at Grandmas

     I believe everything you want must begin in a vision first.  For instance, when I was a 5 or 6 year old little girl living in a big city where row after row of houses were constructed & the school yard had a playground made of concrete, I would pretend to live on a farm in the mountains.  I had a make believe husband & my dolls were my children.  We nestled together in our farmhouse (a make-shift tent from a blanket my mom gave me) & picked apples from our pretend apple tree.  As I got a little older, about 10 years old, my pretend family disappeared & my farmhouse back in the linen closet, but my vision lingered on & I expressed it on paper with a tray of water colors & a paint brush my dad bought me at the art store.  Against a pale blue sky I painted rolling hills dotted with tiny trees in different shapes & sizes and the largest tree adjacent to a house with a pitch roof, two windows and one door.  From the door of the house was a path that stretched out to nowhere.  By the time I was 15 my illustrations were replaced with stories that I'd write from the pictures in my mind.   As an adult I left the city in search of my dream & moved to a little town of Yucaipa - a place the Native Americans had named for it's beauty of the valley.  Yucaipa was a quiet, sleepy community that rolled the streets up at dusk & stores were closed on Sundays.  For sure, I thought, this is where I would meet my Farmer-Prince Charming & my dream would come true.

     Life has its twists & turns, for sure.  Who knows why we start off on one path & then spin off on another.  Perhaps its because what we want is too hard to obtain.  Or, maybe, just maybe, its because there's a spiritual plan already in place & what we want is not in that plan at that time.  For me, I believe the latter.   At 21 years old a tragic car accident in the middle of the night left me laying in a gully some 20 yards from the road, unconscious, alone & bleeding to death from multiple injuries including a fractured skull.  The accident changed my life forever.  I recovered, of course, but I was never quite the same, yet I never stopped dreaming of a farm life.  By the time I was 24 I found my Prince Charming & when I told him my dreams of a farm life he promised me he'd do everything he could to get it for me, but try as he might, we never quite fulfilled my dream.  For the next 16 years, and 5 beautiful children later, I made it my mission to try to create a country atmosphere where ever we lived.  My husband supported me in all I wanted as I raised chickens, planted a garden, canned peaches, apricots, tomatoes & jams, ground my own wheat & made my own bread, crocheted,  sewed & made the kids Halloween costumes.  

     It would be nice if the story ended here & I could say we all lived  happily ever after, but like I said, life has its twist & turns. Twenty years after the first accident (I was now 41) I was hit by a truck & my life began to spin out of control as a result from another brain injury.  Two years later, my husband & I divorced & my family unit shattered.  For the next 12 years I worked to make sense out of my life & to retrain my brain to do those things I knew I once knew, but couldn't remember how I knew them.  As I walked on my path, day by day leaning on three people that I trusted (my then Bishop Craig White, my wonderful Aunt Shirley & my psychologist, Dr. Connie Taylor) I began to trust in the Lord, teach myself my once forgotten homemaking skills & trusted my intuition learning to accept and appreciate my own self, because if I didn't have a mission on this earth my life may not have been spared those two instances where I defied the angel of death.
     My main goal, step-by-step, was to become what I used to be, only better, by teaching myself, re-teaching myself, listening, learning, praying, studying & never giving up.  Twelve years after the 2nd accident, a wonderful man walked into my life, professed his true love for me & ask me to marry him.  I said "I do" and just last month we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary.  

     Today, Barry & I are searching for that land to buy & that farmhouse to build while I work effortlessly in makeing my home a place where my heart lays & my wonderful children come to visit & grandchildren play.  My children are my life & to me, Barry is the icing on the cake!

     I believe everything you want must begin in a vision first.  And then, step by step, you can obtain your dream - even if it takes nearly a lifetime.  I started my young life with a tent, make believe husband & dolls.  Now I am blessed with a wonderful husband & ten grandchildren, a 2 bedroom apartment & garden that constantly needs weeding.  Who could ask for more?  We will get our land.  We will get our farmhouse & chickens.  The children & grandchildren will come to visit.  Step by step.