The illusion of atavism

Last Sunday, I patched a hole in the knees of each of my two favorite pairs of flannel-lined pants. I read the instructions carefully, ironed them on, and reinforced the edges with stitching. As I was stitching around the second patch, we had a brief power outage. It was still light enough to see through the window, but I lit a candle to thread the needle. It felt quaint, patching my pants by candlelight, in my log cabin, with my wolf-looking-dogs on the couch by the fire:



But it's all an illusion: the patch itself was ironed on with delivered AC electricity, the Carhartts are now made in Mexico, the patch is made in China, the adhesive in the patch is from petroleum from Canada, refined using a method that was only developed 20 years ago. The cotton was likely from India. That morning, I had made DL and me smoothies with pineapples from Costa Rica. Even my simple life is extremely complicated just beneath the surface, and none of us escape that time marches on...