Perhaps I should look into that.
The world your great grandma lived in is long since gone. I've never had a wood stove, and I'm 75 years old. I've never used candles as my primary source of illumination. Many years ago I asked my mother, who was born in 1916 on Long Island, NY, when she first got electricity, and it was sometime before she was ten years old. I asked her to describe what life was like without electricity, and she told me. The gas lights. Things being pretty dim at night because of that kind of lighting. I think that once she had electricity, she never looked back. Sort of like me with the internet.
When people got electricity varied tremendously, I know. When we moved from Utica, NY to the rural countryside about ten miles north, there were still some people on some of the nearby farms who'd not gotten electricity yet. This was in 1955, and I'm thinking there were two, maybe three such.
The notion that we can be totally self-sufficient is likewise an outmoded idea. We are all interconnected. It is not realistic to think that we can all raise all of our own food, can build our homes, can mind our livestock, and so on. Honestly, starting several thousand years ago we started specializing, and it's only continued.
I have a friend whose drier is currently broken, and he cannot afford to get it fixed. He hangs his clothes out to dry in his small home. That is not something devoutly to be wished.
Horses. They require a vastly different support system than cars. My mom once told me that when she was in nursing school in the mid 1930s, her classmates thought her parents were rich because they had a car. No, they weren't rich. Her parents were immigrants from Ireland, dad was a gardener and chauffeur for rich people on Long Island, and her mother took in washing for similar people. It's just that they'd already moved into the 20th century and had a car, not a horse.
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