Already Wishing For Spring

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I've taken to sleeping more in the last week or so. Part of it has to do with the prescription drugs I'm using. Sometime sleeping is all there seems left to do to while the ti-me away. It's mostly because of the current weather in my opinion, but above all it's for all the reasons winter has always been winter. I've never liked cold weather. As I've aged I like it even less. It reminds me of my upcoming death, and I don't have a clue what to think about that nearing eventuality.

Winter is the reason why Florida and points south are as popular with the old people as they are. I appear to have made a decision to spend the winters of my youth in Florida rather than the last winters of my dotage. Several times in the past I've gone to Florida specifically to miss one wintery forecast that I wanted to avoid at all costs . It didn't work for me though. When I did that it got cold in Florida too. There is no worse place to be than Florida when it gets cold there too.

There was lots of talk about a decade ago. The changing of the millennium was the talk of the town. Some prophesied the end of the world in 2001. Writing the expression "2010" just now made me think of those times in the 90's when there was some concern that the world was gonna end, and if not then, it would end in 2012 by the ancient Mayan calendar, so the talk has returned. I might not still be here when that rolls around, but I don't believe the world will end or that humans can predict such a thing.

All throughout my life there have been various self-styled prophets who have made claims that the world would end on various occasions. Obviously it has not. I don't know why it hasn't. I have concluded there are two distinctly possible ways it will happen. Either by astroids hitting the Earth or by nuclear holocaust.

There is a scene in my mind's eye from my childhood that I re-member when I think about the success of homo sapiens here on this particular planet at this particular phase of life. In my imagination I "see" my siblings and myself in the back yard of this one house we lived in, just before we moved to this town because of my father's job.

It was/is a house we called "the yellow house" because that's what color it was painted. It was one of the more modern houses we lived in during the time I was a kid. The specific images living in that house conjures, however, are of my family (minus my father) in the back yard of the yellow house washing the family's clothes. We used very primitive tools for washing clothes that seem old as the hills by today's standards.

We had a large cast iron pot we built an open fire around to heat the water. We used a cast iron pump with a thick leather valve to pump water out of the ground for drinking and washing both our clothes and our bodies. Since I was the oldest boy a lot of this physical work was done by me. At that age I didn't think of what I did as work. I was a real gullible child who could easily believe what I was doing was 'for the family'.

There had to be water to cut the yellow lye soap into small pieces to clean the clothes, and there had to be more water pumped and heated to rinse the clothes. All of the pumping and poking and stirring the clothes in the water and on scrub boards. After that, the water had to be changed to rinse the soapy clothes out. It was a lotta work for a family of seven to have clean clothes to wear to school.

My father's clothes all had to be ironed. Like the white shirts he wore a tie with. He was usually one of the only male teachers at the schools he taught at. He was visibly relieved to come home and remove the starched shirt with the stiff neck he'd worn all day.

When I watch the documentaries on TV about primitive cultures all over the world still washing clothes by hand I truly feel for them. By the time we moved to this town where most of my family still lives the automatic clothes washing machines had been invented and between those machines and the electric refrigerators a lot of the work had been reduced to a fairly easy routine.

The arrival of my puberty turned my parents into slave-drivers for the same family chores I'd gladly done before. I don't remember there being any sort of ulterior motive to ruin my parent's lives. One day I was a happy kid doing my share of the chores around the family home, and the next day they were all a bunch of inconsiderate assholes for making me do all that work. Just that fast. Boom!

The house I live in now is practically a mansion compared to the houses I grew up in, and yet it's still called a rathole by my visitors. They don't appear to have a clue what their ancestors went through before it came to this. I bet the people in Haiti would be pleased as punch to live in a rat hole house like mine.

I got running water, inside plumbing, a clothes washing machine AND a dryer, an electric stove, and a refrigerator to keep food from rotting. A bed to sleep in, and a rather nice down comforter that keeps me warm on cold nights like we're having now. We never seemed to have enough covers to keep me warm in the winter when I was a kid.

Although some people think I live like a bum in this still incomplete edifice I call home, all I have to do to let them slide is remember how it was back in the "good ol' days", and I can forgive all the remarks about how slovenly I live in the present. I keep my body washed and warm, that's as far as I'm willing to go to please haughty people who never been a whole day in their life without food or shelter.

Even the primitive way I lived as a child can't compare to how I lived on the road as a bum, but I feel guilty if I find myself owning more than my natal family had when I was a child. Nobody should have to live like I did as a homeless bum. I don't know many people who have. I have to let a lotta things pass without being duped. "Be passerby."

The sprouting I've been trying to bring into my diet is a slow process. I've had some lentils in the jar to let them sprout for a week now, and they're just beginning to emerge a little. The stainless steel screen lids I paid altogether too much for don't fit the regular quart jars I have. They're designed for wide-mouth jars. I still don't have any wide-mouth jars. Maybe I'll be able to get a routine going when I do get those jars that will cause this sprouting business to prove it's worth to me.

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