Another lovely summer day. Everything is so green and blooming now. The corn is high in the fields despite the fact that we could use some rain. Dick, Jim and I are starting to talk fresh corn again. I will have to start looking at the farmer's markets in the next week or so. We have fresh corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes on Saturdays during the season.

On my walk this morning I was thinking about two very progressive women from last century.

The first is a story of a lady. She was a homemaker and a mother at a time when women did not work outside of the home. Of course, in those days, the first 10 years of the 20th century, homemaking was even more of a full time job than it is now. Wash was done in tubs on a washboard, or with a wringer if you were really lucky. Bread was baked from scratch and meals were cooked with no labor saving kits or packages.

Anyway, every summer, this lady and her neighbor would take a weeks vacation. They would spend one week in the backyard, reading and talking and relaxing. They would not clean or cook or sew and then they would go back to being busy housewives.

Pretty cool Right. This was my Grandma Helen Deeley.

The second lady was in her late teens when she and a cousin, traveled to South Dakota to homestead. They picked a plot of land and even built a soddy (a home out of the sod in the area. A common starting home for the homesteaders.) They came home but the wonder is that they did it. This would have been somewhere in the early part of the 20th Century also. Probably a little later than the "vacation". But not much.

I am amazed every time I think of this. What Gutzy ladies. The woman was Dick's mother Alice Kunert.

Be healthy.

Mary