Drawn To a Simpler Time

For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.

Psalm 90:4

I was 11 when I discovered a world I never knew existed. Books. Books. And more...books. I'm sure I grew up with books around me. I remember visiting the library as a child. My mother read chapter books aloud to me and any friends that happened to be at our house but it wasn't until I turned 11 that I discovered the pure joy of reading.

Not only did I discover the pleasure of reading but I also learned that books could take me places I never dreamed of. I traveled west in covered wagons, experienced the depression through the eyes of a girl that 'lived' through it, traveled through time, visited foreign lands. Without warning my world opened up and I lived in a ways I could only imagine. And imagine I did. Not only did I read those stories I spent hours making them up in my head.

I did not know then that those chapter books and the daily doses of Little House on the Prairie that I watched as soon as I escaped the confines of school would mark me for life and create a fascination with a time gone by. Or that years later my life would be changed as I entered an all new world. The world of writing.

Many a day have passed where I wondered what it would have been like to live in a time when things were simpler. A time where morals and faith ruled peoples lives. A time when family and friends held more importance than things. When towns were communities of people pulling together helping each other. Sharing fellowship, sorrows, joys....life.

Those days were not without their problems. Of that I have no doubt. Then, as now, there were believers and non believers. There were law abiding citizens and outlaws. Friendly folks and people that would just as soon shoot you as look at you. 

But...Oh to see those days as they were. To walk the main streets and see the general stores, the women in long dresses, the children in bare feet, streets lined with wagons and horses tied to hitching posts. To walk into a store with .50 and buy...whatever they sold for two quarters and leave with a brown paper wrapped parcel that crinkled in your hands. To see neighbors helping neighbors. 

To live when people revered the Lord, where  often the person standing in front of you shared your beliefs. To live and laugh and love among believers that faced every day in a simpler way because it was a simpler time.  

What about those simpler days draws you to them? When you chose historical fiction over modern what is it that pulls you to those books?