Living in the 1930's, first letter: (Graded one)

August 11th of 1930
Liberty St. 364, Alabama St., USA


Dear Philip,


I want to tell you how my life is going, as we don't talk since a while, we aren't in a good economic situation at all, my father is having trouble with his work, because there was a plague during last months that affected his cows and plantations, so the milk production went down, and we are surviving with the effort of my parents and my brother. We had to move to other ranch which is made of pure pine wood, which is the worst material round here, it is a very small house comapred to the one we had before. The ranch is much samller also, and because of that our new house had to be smaller than the one before, because the plantations and space for cows are more important, if we don't care of those aspects, the producion will be lower, and we won't win the same.

This thing of economical crisis also affected us and the rest of the neighborhood a lot, and it is another reason why we sell less potatoes and corn, along with milk, people doesn't have the same amount of money they had before, many people lost everything with the crisis, and they try to recover the things they lost by saving money instead of having the same demand they had before for food. Our house is one of the most simple ones in the surroundings, but the terrain is one of the biggest, as we work and sleep on this place, we need to take care of the balance between our house and the work.

The image I am sending is our new ranch, as you can see it may not be a very small terrain but notice the materials of everything, and as you can also see almost everything is just soil, there are almost no plantations, at the very back in the middle you can see one of our two cows.

Looking forward to hearing you,

Matías Neuweiler