The furnace was dying, the floors rolled and sagged, the plumbing was bad, plus a murder had taken place there. Built in the late 17th century, it was, if not falling apart, in very used condition. The former solution was the route Gladys Taber and her friend Eleanor Mayer took in the early 1930s when they went looking for 'a place in the country.' After a two-year search, they found the farmhouse of their dreams off Sanford Road in Southbury, Connecticut. Nor did this feeling diminish in 1941 Kate Seredy planted an apartment-living city family on a Catskill farm in The Open Gate where the entire family flourished, and several sitcoms from the 1950s, including The Danny Thomas Show and I Love Lucy, showed the protagonists buying a country home in Connecticut or upstate New York.

With even the least bit of disposable cash, city dwellers would buy an old farmhouse in Connecticut for weekend visits and summer months or invest more in a new suburban home on a commuter rail line so men and women could travel to work by day and come home to fresh sweet air at night, spending all-to-short weekends fixing up the home, mowing the lawn, having outdoor barbecues, while the children played freely in grassy backyards and explored creeks and nearby woods. They worried their kids were growing pale and suffering from Vitamin D deficiencies they themselves longed for scents of grass and trees again rather than exhaust and asphalt. 1930s city dwellers, especially those in New York City, feared the effects of urban living on health and children. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not a new worry. Care for your inner life, not to mention a natural one as well! Writer Richard Louv states today's childrenand a growing number of adultssuffer from 'nature deficit disorder,' that we have lost touch with our natural life in favor of a virtual one, detrimental to our physical and psychological health.

Some recent books and magazines buck this trend, urging the practices of mindfulness, of the Danish concept of hygge, of meditation, of yoga. Butternut Wisdom: A Gladys Taber Fan Pageįinding Stillmeadow 'Butternut Wisdom' Columns Bibliography Links Album

Harvest at stillmeadow by gladys taber