BE PREPARED TO TAKE CARE OF SELF & FAMILY

Be prepared to take care of yourself and your family. Even if you have money in the bank and the banks are insured, with things going the way they are right now, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to keep some cash in a cookie jar. In case of an emergency they'd shut down the banks so there wouldn't be a run on them.

Have food enough for at least a week if not longer. Plant a garden if you have the room to do so. Grow your own food. I remember my Grandparents telling me they knew there was a "depression" but that they didn't notice it much because they were poor already, they lived in the country and they grew their own food. They made do with what they had, and lived off the land.

Learn how to "put up" your own food, i.e., can it, freeze it, dry it. I live on a lot in the middle of town that is 33' wide and 152' deep. I've been able to have a sizeable garden in that space.

I once spent several frantic days of a very hot summer week before I had air-conditioning canning a "side" of beef. My father-in-law asked casually "would you like to have a side of beef", and of course, I said yes. In the past all sides of beef I got were neatly packaged and frozen and I'd bring them home and put them in the freezer. He hauled out a whole rib of beef (approximately 3' x 3' and put it in the trunk of my car! I was astounded. What am I going to do with that? I asked. "Can it." When I got home, I shifted the raw side of beef out of my trunk into my son's little red wagon and hauled it into the house where I somehow got it up on the kitchen table. Then I sterilized canning jars and heated up my pressure canner, and began carving chunks of meat off the ribs and plopping them into cans. When the cans were full, I'd put in a teaspoon of salt, put sterilized lids on top, pop them into the pressure canner, and when it was full, put the lid on it, and can the beef for a half hour or more, the whole time resuming the whole process once again, sterilizing more jars, filling more jars, until I had canned nearly 48 quarts of beef. I got all the jars filled and into the refrigerator, still canning in the pressure canner all night long.

I had already canned lots of tomatoes and peaches and green beans from our garden, but with the beef, we lived on vegetable soup a lot for a couple of years. I even ended up canning vegetable soup so we could have it spread out over the year instead of eating it all at once. Beef stew worked well too.

At the time we were also burning wood to supplement our gas furnace in the winter. We cut down trees (some of them I pushed down), and split them and put them in cords for burning. We'd then toss them down into the old coal bin at the house, and burn them in a wood stove that was attached to our furnace. We went through some pretty cold winters and saved a lot of money on natural gas by burning wood. The only downfall was forgetting to run down the basement and fill up the woodburner, and we'd awaken to a house that was 45 degrees (the gas furnace would kick on at 45 degrees when the wood fire went out).

I remember my Grandmother telling me about her mother's bank savings. For a number of years my Great-grandmother had saved her egg money at the bank, in preparation to buy herself a new woodstove for her kitchen. When the depression
came along it wiped out her savings account and she never did get a new woodstove.

The one thing I noticed through those years was that no matter how much money was coming in to the house, there was always enough. One way or another we always survived and we always had enough to meet our basic needs.

The one thing we need to remember is that "God is the Source of our Supply" and we should stop worrying about where it's coming from, just sigh a deep sigh of relief as say "Thank you God for taking care of us."