If I could only remember that the days were, not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
All men and women need a roof over their heads and need to be fed and have proper health care. I don't know that I believed that, or even understood that, in the early days.
Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.
Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.
Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.
In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.
I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.
The home should be the treasure chest of living.
The habit of building houses upon piles, which was first forced upon the people by the position they had chosen, was afterwards followed as a matter of taste, just as it is in Holland.
Home wasn't built in a day.
You were not built for comfort and convenience. You were built to overcome.