OUR FUTURE IS NOW
(In working on my dad's life story, Joni told me to contact
my oldest brother to get my parents' love letters, and stories my mother
had written. He had been injured on the landings at Normandy and was sent
stateside to an army hospital for surgery on his hand and arm.
She attended a dance/party for the servicemen and they met there.
They married in July of 1945 and he wasn't released from the service until January
of 1946. They moved from Utah back to Wisconsin where he was from.
Housing and jobs were in short
supply after WWII, so they moved into a trailer that was placed
on his parent's farm in Wisconsin. He couldn't find a job locally, so he worked out of town
from Sunday evening to lateSaturday night for the first five years of their new marriage.
They kept letters from when they were dating and those first five yeas of marriage.
She was an aspiring author when they were first married.
She used her time at night to write the short
stories and magazine articles,
and successfully published three or more short stories. There is quite
a collection of stories that she wrote, that had been returned from publishers.
None of us had ever read any of this material before.
What a treasure to find!
This is one of her short articles.)
(A picture of them on their couch in their "house trailer".)
When we purchased a house trailer, which was to be used as a
stationary dwelling, we thought of it as makeshift at best, something of a
substitute nature, and at first we lived in it temporarily. We planned to stay in it until an apartment
became available in our price range, or until building materials became more
plentiful and less expensive. But the
apartments which were occupied, and priced within our means, remained occupied, and after awhile, the prices went beyond our means. Building materials became plentiful, but the
price tag placed upon them was exorbitant, and so what we had planned on living
in for a few months “until fall”, became our home for an indefinite time.
We lived within the confinement of a home 24 feet long and 8
feet wide for quite some time before we became aware of the fact that we
couldn’t continue to live there on a substitutional basis. We must begin to accept it as the now, the
present, and govern our actions accordingly.
It is a human fallacy to consider what today provides as only the
circumstances of the present and to continually project oneself into the future
as the time when living will actually take place, when this luxury or that
foible will be an integral part of daily living.
There are advantages and disadvantages in living in a
trailer house. The space is small, and
therefore, it is not necessary to keep a very large area clean, but it is
extremely important to maintain order, for without order, chaos soon
develops. In a trailer a housewife can
not possibly walk the multitudinous miles often accredited to her in an
ordinary day’s work in a kitchen.
Everything in the small kitchen is within arm’s reach. One movement is all that is necessary to get
from one side of the working space to the other. The storage space, though not as plentiful as
might be desired, is within convenient reach.
It is well to remember though, that one person working in the kitchen
area is sufficient, in order to avoid much confusion and collision. Probably the most important thing to learn about
preparing food in so small a space is to use a minimum of dishes. Otherwise, you become surrounded with the pots
and pans you have just used and there is no place on which to put the ones you
are about to press into service.
We were, at first, much inclined to put off having and
enjoying many of the little luxuries available for the use of the American
housewife. When electric mixers became
plentiful after the critical war years, I wanted one very much. Where would we put it? There was no tuck-away shelf on which to hide
it, no convenient cabinet where it could be placed, nothing but the working
counters and those were already well-occupied by the canister set on one side
and on the side where the sink was placed, the cleaning materials, soap, floor
wax, cleanser, etc., for which there was no other room, were stored. Months went by during which we decided that we
must wait, that a mixer actually did not belong in a trailer, that it would
take up more room and be more of an inconvenience than an aid to efficient
housekeeping. But our self-arguments
were to no avail and one day we purchased that handy appliance.
Now I could mix my cakes, using a minimum of effort and one
bowl, to a feathery lightness. Whipped
potatoes could be served from the same bowl in which they were prepared. Here was an appliance which worked wonders
with egg whites, whipping cream, cooked frostings, and took so much of the
tiring arm work out of so many jobs.
Also, there was an attachment which came with it, the juicer, which
enabled me to extract juice from oranges speedily and with practically no
effort. Later, when they became
available, a food grinder attachment was added to this equipment. This is in use many times during the week,
for grinding sandwich meat, for making a palatable and readily prepared hash
from the left-over roast, potatoes and vegetables, and for grinding nuts,
fruits, and many other foods to just the right texture, determined by the type
of cutting blade used. A cheap cut of
meat can be ground easily and quickly to make patties which are delicious and
oh-so-tender.
Where did we put this equipment? By moving the canister set closer together it
fitted nicely into the niche in the corner, and covered with an attractive
plastic cover, became a part of the decoration scheme of the miniature
kitchen. The juicer attachment has a
spot of its own in the shelf directly above the mixer and the grinder parts are
also placed there, in a plastic bag, through which a drawstring has been run,
thus avoiding misplacing the small pieces of the equipment.
I am a working wife and after inspecting the many and varied
pressure pans on the market, I became quite convinced that meals could be
prepared rapidly, with a minimum loss of food value, in such a pan. Of course, since our living was temporary we
could do without it and what if it did take longer to cook the potatoes when we
were in a hurry? But the months
stretched out and the indefinite stay became quite definite and the pressure
pan was ultimately purchased. Only it
was not a small pressure pan, but a small pressure cooker, a seven quart
capacity. We reasoned that such a size
would do large cuts of meat nicely, a whole chicken, and what was more
important, the cooker could be used to do a small amount of canning. Now I cook large pots of chili, old-fashioned
vegetable soup, or tenderize an old chicken, which later is browned to a
delicious crispness, very handily in this utensil. In the summer I do some canning, just a few
jars of our favorite fruits and vegetables, not too important a part of our
diet perhaps, but the main thing is that it is available if I so take the
notion.
Where is this large cooker stored in our place of limited
storage area? There are two racks in the
oven and these are arranged so that there is room for the cooker, its lid, two
frying pans and covers to fit handily into it.
Of course, when the oven is to be used they have to be taken out and
placed on the top of the range, or if that is in use, on a stool, and when the
oven is turned off, they are returned to their storage space.
An electric toaster, once thought to be too cumbersome for
our little home, now has its own space reserved beside the electric mixer. It is covered with a matching plastic cover
to blend with that of the mixer.
The heat of cooking in itself is a problem in such a
confined area, but we partially solved that by installing a ventilating fan in
the window over the range. This, too,
was purchased after a long period of temporizing. Still, it is necessary to open all windows
and the door in order to allow the odors and heat of cooking to escape before
eating, especially if we have guests.
Guests are as momentous a problem as any connected with this
type of living. Though our trailer is
not one of the luxurious houses on wheels that one sees in the trailer sales
lots today, it does have some ingenious features, one of which is the
table. It is a collapsible affair which
folds up against the wall, the benches included. When in place to be used there is room to
seat four persons quite comfortably, but when the service for four is arrayed
on the table, there is little room left for serving dishes. Part of these are placed on a stool, and this
suffices, though the arrangement is an awkward one.
Recently we purchased a folding chair to use at the long end
of the table, and thus seat five people.
This also comes in handy when the table is in place against the wall and
we have more guests than our davenport can accommodate. When the chair is folded, it fits behind the
davenport, against the wall and out of sight.
There are definite shortcomings in this way of life, most
prominent among them would be the lack of storage space. But we have found that if each article is
kept in its own special nook, the difficulty is reduced to a minimum. A good rule we have found is PICK IT UP –
KEEP IT CLEAN. This is more than a rule,
it is a code to follow which becomes a prime necessity. A scrap of paper on the floor, an unwashed
coffee cup, a jacket draped over the davenport, stands out like a sore thumb.
We are learning important things in this way of living. We are learning to conserve time, to make
space count, and above all, to be neat and tidy. When we at long last have our home, and be it
small or roomy, it will seem infinitely capacious to us, we can apply this
knowledge to good advantage. We will try
to remember to live each day to the utmost, in the present, the now, enjoying
the goodness of the things which make life more bountiful; never dwelling upon
that far off Utopia, the tomorrow when all things will be composed of
perfection. We will keep in mind that our
sterling silver was as much at home when it graced the fold-down table in our
trailer house as it will be in any other place we live.
Written by Nedra Littlefield Culp
