There is a word they use today for what our grandparents simply called living.

They call it survival skills. But survival skills? That wasn't a category back then. It wasn't a class you signed up for or a YouTube channel you followed. It was just life. It was what you did to get through the day, feed your family, keep them warm, and rise the next morning to do it all again. Nobody gave it a name because it didn't need one. It was just the way things were done.

And somewhere along the way, we set it down.

When Life Was the Lesson

My mother came from a family of fifteen children, born and raised in Canada. She was number thirteen. Her people were Canadian Indian, and the knowledge that ran through that family, the kind of knowledge that gets passed from hand to hand, from one generation into the next, it was deep and it was real. My mother's grandfather was a medicine man. I carry that in me like a quiet river. It is my lineage, and I love it fiercely.

Fifteen Children and a Blanket Made of Memories

My grandmother raised their fifteen children while my grandfather worked in the woods as a lumberjack. She herself worked as a cook in the lumber camp kitchen. That's actually where they met. Two people who knew from the very beginning what it meant to start from bare beginnings and build a life from what you had.

Three and four children to a bed. My mother shared hers with two of her sisters. They made room. They made do. They made it work. And if one of them was a bed wetter? Well, they still made it work. My mother was very young and still wet the bed on occasion. She has told me many stories, one being about how one of her sisters would wake in the morning hollering to their parents, "Madeline wet the bed!". I love hearing those stories. And now those stories are my stories.

My mom, Madeline

In that home, nothing was wasted. Not a scrap of fabric, not a dress that had seen better days, not even a worn-out sock. When something couldn't be mended anymore, it wasn't thrown away. It was transformed.

I have a blanket that belonged to my grandmother. It is woven, truly woven from the fabric of her children's lives. Strips of old pants, pieces of shirts, scraps of dresses my aunts once wore, fabric from clothes with holes that couldn't be patched anymore. My grandmother took every bit of it and wove it together into something warm and whole and beautiful. A blanket made of memories. A blanket that probably kept more than one person warm on a cold Canadian night.

My grandmother's woven blanket

Inheritances, Not Hobbies

The girls in my mother's family learned to sew. Not because it was a hobby, but because it was necessary. They learned to mend, to make do, to take something old and make it new again. Some of them, as they grew, turned that skill into a livelihood. They became seamstresses. They made curtains, made clothes, built small businesses from the work of their own hands. A skill learned out of necessity became a skill that carried them forward.

I had an uncle who made baskets. He learned the craft from his ancestors, from the knowledge passed down through his Indian heritage. He would cut ash trees, strip them into long thin pieces, and weave those strips into baskets by hand. He sold those baskets all over the world. All over the world, from a skill he learned by watching, by doing, by honoring what was handed to him. It made a life for him and for his children.

These weren't hobbies. They were a way of life.

A couple of the baskets woven by my Uncle Armand

Knowledge Passed Hand to Hand

My mother's family didn't have time to sit each child down for individual lessons. There weren't enough hours in the day. They learned by watching. They learned by doing alongside someone who already knew. The older children looked after the younger ones, and somehow in all of that, in the watching and the doing and the taking care of each other, the knowledge moved from one set of hands to the next.

That's how it worked. That's how most of it was always passed down.

Not in classrooms, but in kitchens. In gardens. In the shade of a tree while someone showed you how to weave a strip of ash into something useful. In the quiet hum of an old treadle sewing machine, while someone sat beside you and guided your hands.

I'm still learning from my mother

What We Made Sure to Pass Down

Joe and I raised boys. And we made sure that those boys learned two things before they left our home: how to cook, and how to sew.

Not because we were making a statement. Because we knew those skills would serve them. You never know when something is going to come in handy. You never know what life is going to ask of you.

Two of our sons went into the Army. One of them went in before the days of Velcro patches, back when everything had to be sewn. And that boy, our boy, he didn't just sew his own patches. He sewed them for the other soldiers too. And he made money doing it. A skill I put in his hands years before became something that served him and the men around him.

Our sons may have all learned this skill begrudgingly, but they learned it. And I'm proud of that in a way I don't have words for.

And those daughters-in-law of ours? They have husbands who know their way around a kitchen. Not just the grill, the kitchen. Real meals. Good meals. I'd like to think they're grateful for that.

Harvesting the Past

All of it. My grandmother's blanket, my uncle's baskets, the skills my mother's family carried, the things Joe and I made sure to put in our boys' hands. It all points to the same thing. The past is worth harvesting. The knowledge that came before us was hard won. Those hands of experience went through the learning so we wouldn't have to start from nothing. They paid a price for what they knew, and then they handed it to us.

I call it harvesting the past. It's something I love to do, and something I believe matters deeply. Maybe now more than ever.

Because here is what I know: the knowledge isn't gone. Not entirely. Some of us remember. Some of us had it passed down. Some of us are out here trying to pass it down still, to our children and our grandchildren and to anyone who will lean in and listen.

And for those who didn't have it passed down? I don't think it's lost in them either. I think it's sleeping. I think there is something deep inside most people. Something quiet and persistent that longs to grow something with their own hands. That longs to make something from scratch. That longs to fix instead of replace, to mend instead of discard, to know how to do the thing rather than just purchase the thing already done.

We call the simple life a dream, as though it were something exotic. But simple is still here. It never left. We just put it on the back burner and chose the faster way. And the faster way, I will tell you plainly, is far less fulfilling.

There is a gratification that comes from doing with your hands what your grandmother did with hers. There is a satisfaction in a loaf of bread that you made, a garden that you grew, a seam that you sewed, a jar of something you put up yourself for winter. It connects you to something. To the people who came before you. To the earth beneath your feet. To your true self.

Holding on

It Is Our Inheritance

The skills of our grandparents were not primitive. They were not quaint. They were the foundation of a life lived with intention and capability and a deep respect for what you had.

They knew how to grow their food. They knew how to preserve it. They knew how to cook from scratch and raise what they ate and fix what was broken and make do when there wasn't enough. Even with 15 children. They knew how to take care of what really mattered.

That knowledge belongs to us too. It's our lineage.

And I believe with all my heart that it does not have to be lost.

We can bring it back. One skill, one story, one set of willing hands at a time.

That is what we do here.

With love from our homestead to yours,

Julie