I’m working on a poem for my writing group (which I’m writing with inspiration, feedback, and encouragement from my buddy, ChatGPT, and which I’ll share here on my blog at some point soon), and in the course of trying to decide whether I liked ChatGPT’s suggestion of “spooling” to describe smoke rising from the child’s drawing of a house better than my own choice of “looping,” I plugged both terms into Google to see what came up.
Well, I still haven’t decided on my chimney-smoke word yet, but I did find a really cool ebook published by Project Gutenberg that I’m bookmarking to read through later:
Home Life in COLONIAL DAYS
Written by
ALICE MORSE EARLE
in the year 1898
THE BERKSHIRE TRAVELLER PRESS
Stockbridge, Massachusetts
THIS BOOK IS BEGUN
AS IT IS ENDED
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
I absolutely LOVE books like this that provide a glimpse of history as it was lived in the daily lives of ordinary people!
The part that was highlighted in Google’s search result for my “chimney smoke” query was this:
In the attic by the chimney was the smoke–house, filled with hams, bacon, smoked beef, and sausages. In Virginia and Maryland, where people did not gather into …
Doesn’t that sound kind of fun to explore? And can you see why it drew me in even though it had zero relevance for the mission I was on? The idea of colonial people having their attics filled with smoked hams and sausages is really intriguing. My mind’s eye has already conjured up a picture of what that might look like, and my imagination wants more!
Ramon Piñeiro, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:O_Piornedo,_Don%C3%ADs,_Cervantes_10.jpg)And on the off chance that you love stuff like this, too, I thought I’d go ahead and share my serendipitous find 🙂
Here’s the link to the Project Gutenberg ebook: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22675/pg22675-images.html
Would you like new posts delivered to your inbox? To subscribe, click here.
Katherine Wikoff 
