In recovery

Yesterday was exhausting, but was a valuable lesson in how we must merge a handmade life with today's technological advances, if we are to survive.  On Saturday, my son was working for the day in a friend's almond orchard, when he accidentally got whacked in the face with a tree branch, hitting one of his eyes.  The next day, he had a black eye and the eyeball itself was extremely sore.  Never one to rush to the docs, we treated it with saline solution washes, and waited to see if whatever had gotten into his eye would wash out.  


By Monday morning, it was apparent the eye would not respond to simple home treatment, and so off we went to, first the family doctor, and next, to an opthamologist we were referred to.  Looking into my son's eye with her super-duper microscope binoculars, the opthamologist was able to see an embedded splinter of almond bark inside my son's eye, completely invisible to the naked eye.  She showed me her view through the binoculars, and it looked like a pristine and clear car windshield with a pit in it, and a small brown piece of wood in the middle of the "pit." She numbed his eye up with drops, and went in with a needle-like tool and removed it -- voila!  It was all over within an hour.


But it drove the point home that Woody Allen so beautifully made in his movie, "Midnight in Paris."  One of the characters is talking about the wisdom of being able to go back in time (it's a time travel movie) and basically says it's all well and good until you need to go the the dentist and want novocaine, or need a good antibiotic, say, zithromax, and find you're living 100 years before those things were invented.


We homesteaders love the simple life.  We love our home remedies and we love our food home grown and baked from scratch.  We love our lamplight and our strawberry preserves. Yet we also need this modern era as well.  Without it, there would be no microscope binoculars, no opthamologists, and no antibiotics.  And that's when losing an eye would not be an uncommon thing anymore, much as it was not uncommon for our ancestors, who lived the homesteading life without the benefit of today's medical advances.


We need the gifts of today as much as the gifts of yesterday. Homesteaders are asking for the best of both worlds, and it's something that's reasonable to ask for.  But it will only happen if the world allocates its resources wisely.

Recovering nicely