What I Can't Live Without

I’ve been writing a true story that takes place around World War 2, and it’s made me feel like the biggest whiner when I complain about car pools and early-out school days. Don’t get me wrong, I probably won’t stop complaining about those things because they are incredibly frustrating to me but I feel a bit guilty nonetheless.


There are many conveniences that simply didn’t exist a generation or two ago and I thought it appropriate to make a short list of the things that I’m simply not willing to live without. I will also kneel down tonight and thank God that I wasn’t a pioneer—I don’t like animals enough for that.

So, naturally, the first thing I can’t live without is packaged meat. I don’t ever want to have to break a chicken’s neck and I really can’t imagine the painstaking process of plucking all the feathers off that bird. Long ago I forbade my husband and my nephews from bringing an elk home from the hunt unless it came back to me in white butcher paper with neat little labels. That’s why I’m pretty sure that their hunting trips consisted mostly of eating rice crispy bars and messing around with the satellite dish so that they could pick up the football games in the motor home. Plus, I discovered that they had forgotten to pack the ammo.

I also love my washer and dryer. If I had to clean soiled farmer clothes on a wash board, I may have been tempted to rub my forehead against it instead. I realize that hanging laundry is “green,” but it also turns bath towels into sandpapery boards that are great for exfoliation but not very comfortable on your more tender parts. The new dryers also steam clean and are big enough to dry a comforter. That’s convenience at its best.

Hot showers rank pretty high up there too. Actually I like everything that goes with a hot shower like disposable razors and really good conditioner. I lived with naturally curly hair through the 80’s when good hair products were nonexistent and big hair was the style simply because humidity ruled the land unopposed. Thank goodness for Paul Mitchell.

I have nothing but love for modern medicine. Nothing makes me happier than popping a couple of pills when a headache strikes knowing that I’m going to be pain free in about fifteen minutes. I also love NyQuil because it knocks my cranky kids out for a full 8 hours when they’re sick—you just can’t beat tranquility in a bottle. Vaccines get a bum deal these days but I bet a nasty bout of the Spanish flu or polio would remind people that they are little miracle shots. Thanks to modern medicine most mothers will never have to bury a young child—something that mothers two generations ago did with heartbreaking frequency.

My list could fill a book and then some. Yes, I love the internet and Netflix on demand rocks. My car, heck, any car makes me happy as long as it can get me from point A to point B without overheating. I like turning on every light in my house in the middle of the winter because gray days bite and I’m okay with basking in artificial light—even if I have to blame the big utility bill on my children when my husband complains about it (which he always does.) But the point is that sometimes I’m incredibly shallow and I forget what the women from my past went through just to raise their children into adulthood. They didn’t worry about their children going to head-start or whether their kid would make the basketball team without attending training camp. That’s what we worry about because we can. I’ll take that worry any day because I can’t bake a decent loaf of wheat bread to save my life.