Simple Times

A PART OF THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE

BY SUZY M c CRAY

When Mack and I married, he couldn’t understand why I needed so many bookcases and bookshelves. He studies his Bible a great deal (and has a good selection of biblical reference books) and he enjoys reading news and sports articles on his tablet, but he couldn’t quite understand why I kept so many books and magazines, some that I read and reread multiple times!

Right now beside my side of our bed, there are back issues of several older homesteading magazines. Single articles torn out and raggedly stacked nearby include some on making herbal tinctures, the pros and cons on whether a hoop house needs a secondary heating source, why smaller species of milk goats are the best fit for many small homesteads, and how aquaponics are replacing conventional farming in an agricultural state where I lived for three years in the 1970s.

Yes, we can question any search engine and find free YouTube videos about every subject we need on this homestead, but there’s just something about holding a book or magazine in my hand that helps the information jump from the printed page into my aging brain.

I’m basically a nonfiction girl. I like to read about actual folks who solve problems, maintain happy families and serve the Lord. Although I did write a little fiction for children’s Sunday School literature back in the 1980s, the majority of my writing through nearly four decades has basically been nonfiction. Even the four books to my credit are entirely nonfiction as they include many of the articles that have been featured in these Simple Times articles.

But it saddens me to read statistics provided by GoodeReader.com where they note that 33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives. Forty-two percent of college grads never read another book after college.

This is in spite of Tom Corley’s findings in "Change your Habits, Change your Life" that 88% of financially successful people read at least 30 minutes a day! And telegraph.co.uk notes that numerous studies show that some sort of daily reading reduces stress by 68%!

Another study shows that people in the United States spend 10 times more time watching TV than reading ANYTHING! And I would guess that number is even higher than the folks they studied.

Even in a church group when we were discussing the importance of Daily Bible Reading, one man in his early 50s noted, “We don’t have any kids at home anymore, so we don’t do it.”

But if you’re reading this magazine and this article, you are already on the way up! And even the Audiobooks folks note that nearly one in five Americans listen to Audiobooks, often while doing other tasks such as driving. So all is not completely lost!

So, in what is usually one of the biggest times of the year on our homesteads and farms, why in the world am I writing about reading? Who has time to sit down between weeding the garden, planting a second crop of tomatoes, mowing the lawns, chopping firewood for NEXT year, and making sure all the chickens, ducks, turkeys, guineas and goats have sufficient clear clean water as the days grow hotter. And soon there will be harvesting all sorts of vegetables and fruits that need to be “put up” by pressure canning, drying or freezing.

But here I go….

My mama was a reader (and my daddy to a point although he often went to sleep with a Zane Grey book or his Sunday School quarterly laying across his lap!).

One thing my mama and several of her friends enjoyed reading were novels by Grace Livingston Hill so being an avid reader, I read many of the books Mama collected, borrowed, and checked out of the Oneonta Library. They were good books, always teaching a moral, often containing a love story, and always turning out well in the end!

And oh, later on, how I could identify with Hill’s reasoning for her big output of stories. Her husband died leaving her with two young children and no means to support them other than her writing!

This was after her first books as a young adult were written in 1887 to earn enough money for her family to attend the summer Chautauqua gathering (kind of a religious revival type event) at Chautauqua, New York. That book was published in time so that when they reached the event from their then-home in Florida, the book was available at the meeting for the price of 60 cents each!

A First Edition of "The Search," written by Grace Livingston Hill and published in 1919.

So I enjoyed books by this hard working, hard writing woman all through my teen years and early adult hood. My mama began a collection of Grace Livingston Hill paperbacks after she was widowed. But after Mama’s death those books were lost when a relative left them in a home that was cleaned out before she could retrieve them. But just this past week, I was given a gold mine and I don’t mean financially!

A dear friend asked if I would like to have her ma ma’s Grace Livingston Hill books because she had no where to properly enjoy them after her mother’s death. Of course I agreed but I was in for a major surprise!

When my friend Cara arrived this week she brought 59 hardback books and 13 paperbacks! The hardbacks include at least two Grace Livingston Hill First Editions and many others that are scarce and hard to obtain! Many of the books go back to the 1920s and a couple even earlier!

Two of the first books I pulled out of their big boxes are listed on eBay for more than $100 each because of their rarity! But they are certainly not for sale! They are permanently ensconced on shelves in my sewing room so that I can just look up at them and smile and be encouraged!

I love the fact that Mrs. Hill was a woman before her time but one who clung to the traditions and hopes of the past. When one of her publishers began to back away from publishing “so much religion” in her fiction books, she found another publisher! And when that newest book became a huge bestseller (including the Gospel presentation that Mrs. Hill ALWAYS included in her books) the first publisher backed down and never censored her books again!

"Marigold," published in 1938, "The Seventh Hour," published in 1939 and "The Challengers," published in 1932.

So in between shelling beans and “putting up” corn this summer, and in between making goat milk soap for our little farm store, I imagine there will be some fiction reading in my future again!

Try reading a little bit every day if you’re not used to reading. Whether you’re interested in sports, farming, hunting, fishing, herbs, cooking, or any number of other subjects, return to books and magazines and see what you’ve been missing! Maybe there’s some of you that are just like me and love the smell of a hardback book…

And I love the FEEL of the pages of my daddy’s Bible where he marked 2 Timothy 3:16-17 about the importance of reading the Scripture. “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”

Happy reading!

(Suzy and husband Mack live on a homestead in Blount County, Alabama and can be reached on Facebook or by email at suzy.mccray@yahoo.com)