Prepping Before Prepping Was Cool

When I was growing up, our utility room was full of wire shelving. The shelves were loaded with toiletries, cleaning supplies, paper goods, canned goods, dry goods, and dog food.

We weren't stockpiling for nuclear war, a Yellowstone eruption, civil unrest, financial collapse, EMP, martial law, plague, alien invasion, Nibiru, a global flood, pole shift, AI takeover, or any other SHTF, TEOTWAWKI, Doomsday event. We didn't even call it stockpiling, and we certainly didn't call it "prepping".

You see, my dad was a roofer. Roofing is feast or famine work. In the winter, nobody's lookin' to get a new roof. Even if they were, nails shatter cold shingles. Around here, spring means storms that sometimes form without warning. So, aside from the occasional patch job, spring work is sporatic. Early summer is busy. The chance for rain is low, and the spring storms have done their damage. In mid summer work stops in the early afternoon. The shingles become too soft to work with, and they can't be walked on. When the temps come down toward the end of summer, eight hour days resume.

So twice a year, during feast times in early summer and again in the fall, Dad started puttin' up. (I think he borrowed the term from his childhood, when my Gram 'put up' food throughout the harvesting seasons to be used in the winter.) And twice a year, in the famine times in winter into spring and mid to late summer, we lived off of what Dad put up.

I married a construction man. The feast and famine times aren't so drastic now, but weather puts work on hold fairly often. We have always put up for the slower times. Around 2010, the bottom fell out of construction in our area. Work began to dry up and the small contractors folded. Adam worked for his dad's company and was able to keep going a little longer than most of the other smaller companies in the area by doing smaller jobs and odd jobs. By the time my father-in-law had to call it, most of the job openings for the larger construction companies, factories and warehouses were filled. There were a lot of guys looking for work. Adam applied everywhere he could think of including the gas station down the street. Then he started looking in Wichita, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, North Dakota, Luisianna. He was out of work for over four months.

We had very little in the way of savings. There would have been no way for us to pay our bills and keep ourselves fed and clean. But we didn't have to choose. I had been puttin' up for years. We were clean and fed and the little money we had was all free to go toward house payment and utilities.

Our food and supply storage kept us afloat until we had income flowing again.

Next Time...

Building a good food and supply storage doesn't have to be expensive or complicated. For the last couple of years, I've been feeding my family of 5 while growing our storage on about $65 a week. Next time, I'll explain how I do that, and how we eat out of our food storage to keep it rotated.

---

---

Sotall Directory of Steemit Posts
Sotall Community Forums