thankfulness four

I am thankful for my mechanical servants. They wash my dishes and my clothes, dry the clothes, entertain me and keep me informed. I don't need to send a footman with a note to all my knitting buddies to plan a party. I just e-mail. I don't need a washerwoman, and thanks to my penchant for poly-cotton knits, I don't need a maid to weild the flatirons.

We have so much food half-prepared these days. I don't need to hire a cook to spend entire days making chicken stock for the soup, or mixing up baking powder and fiddling with the wood and the dampers to bake a cake. Noodles are ready-made. Chickens arrive ready plucked and pulled, often cut and sorted into parts, sometimes even skinned and boned. I don't even know how to pluck a bird. Imagine plucking that whole doggone turkey!

I am thankful for sliced bread, and packaged butter. I am grateful that I don't have to spend my life in the kitchen just to put food on the table. I am grateful I never had to learn how to can beans or salt pork.

I am oh, so thankful for my refrigerator and freezer! Living on dried, pickled and home-canned all winter long would be SO grim!

I have so much leisure and luxury. No problems with the coachman and the ostler getting into fights. No wondering what to do when it turns out the kitchen maid was no better than she should be and is now in an interesting condition, but she's the only one who gets along with the cook, and the cook is conservative with a budget and liberal with a meal, so she must be catered to.

On the days when I get home from work just bone tired, I want to go down on my knees and thank all the powers that be that I do not have to wash sheets, towels, levis, and dresses with seven yard hemlines by hand on a washboard.

And I am thankful that I have so much food available to me that I can be fourty pounds overweight. (Sarah Bernhardt was the most beautiful woman of her day. She was five feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. She was cinched so tightly into her corsets that her hips stuck out vertically from her waist. This was beautiful. Her forearms were so plump that the bone on her wrist did not show. Plump round women were a sign of wealth and luxury. I'm thankful I can drop a few pounds without losing my charms.)

I am thankful DH and I don't have to go to the Thanksgiving dinners we grew up with - complete with hurt feelings, angry people, drunken parents and spiritual battering. We usually avoid the "Family" holidays. I am so thankful that we don't have to travel cross-country to be with people we might love, but don't really get along with. We are going out for dinner tonight at a nice restaurant. I am thankful for the people who will be cooking and serving our meal and cleaning up after us.

And I am thankful, with every breath I take, for my dear husband, who takes care of me and provides me with every possible opportunity to be happy.