I was the quintessential “Earth Mother.”

Did any of y’all go through a phase like that? I’ve been remembering those days long ago, as the television news warns me of dire economic times ahead.

It was the early 70s, and I had already missed my chance to be a “hippie.” In my conservative small town, few of us had been brave enough to buck our parents convictions and experiment with that lifestyle.

When I married Mr. X, I made up for it. It was my own personal “back to the land movement.” I grew my own vegetables and learned to preserve them. After months of slaving in the garden and the kitchen, the shelves of my pantry were lined with colorful jars of tomatoes, beans, okra, and corn. At the time, I could have bought the same amount of colorful cans of those vegetables at the store for a couple of hundred dollars.

Hours over the stove produced an exceptionally fine picante sauce coveted by many who were the recipients of my generosity. More than one person requested jars of “Aunt Shelly’s Plum Jelly.” I confess that I took great pride in the fact that I didn’t have to buy produce from the store. But, I wasn’t considering what my time was worth.

Though I had not been taught these skills as a child (my mother’s generation had forgotten, or never learned, to do them), I learned from books how to can vegetables. Usually I was successful.

There was that one embarrassing incident when I tried to impress my German mother-in-law. I attempted to turn my cabbage crop into sauerkraut. Painstakingly, I hand shredded every head, mixed my batch of kraut and put it in an enormous crock to ferment. When I examined it and saw a film of gunk floating on top, I was aghast. I thought it was ruined, and dumped it in the garden so no one would see my failure — only to find perfect sauerkraut beneath the scum. I had no idea it was supposed to do that! My mother-in-law’s conviction that I was an idiot was confirmed in her narrow mind.

I honed my homemaking skills far beyond what most people did. I hand-dipped my own candles. I made my own scented soaps. I learned to spin thread on a spinning wheel, to weave thread into cloth, grew my own dye garden to color the wool, and even raised a “herd” of angora rabbits for their hair. I could take that hair and make something to wear (with several months of labor). We would never go nekkid …unless we wanted to do so.

I was confident that, if the economy collapsed, my skills would help our family survive independently. There were folks who laughingly suggested that I should have been born in frontier times, since my hobbies all seemed to be derived from activities that women did back then.

Let me assure you that those things are much more enjoyable if you don’t have to do them to survive!

That phase of my life only lasted a couple of years. I feel certain, however, that if our current economy collapses I still have the skills within me to help us survive.

Sunday Scribblings posed the following writing prompt:

The exercise this week is to decide what era in history you would choose to live in if you couldn’t live now. Not just when, but why? While you’re at it, how about where? What do you imagine life would be like?

I’ve used that as a prompt, but I’ve had to turn it around a bit. One would think I’d choose frontier times…but, no. In fact, I simply do not choose to imagine living in any time but the present.

It is true that we are living in very frightening times. However, I have no false nostalgia for the past. Every time period had its drawbacks. It might be fun to pretend for a few hours at a Renaissance fair or a pioneer village, but I’m happy with right here … right now.

Even with all the political and economic turmoil, my friends, these are pretty darned good times to be alive.

I know that many of us are thinking in negative mode right now. But, I want you to stop for a moment and think of one good thing about life in the here and now. You only have to think of one. You can tell me in a comment or not, as long as you hear your answer.