completed last night: The “Shelley” warp with “Storm” (mostly blues) “Water” (mostly greens), and “Wave” (mostly peacock) shawls. Each woven with dozens of Canadian hand-painted merino wool and handspun dyed-in-the-wool yarns, and about 25″ wide by 65″ to 75″ long plus fringes. This is the first warp of the year and two of them will be in the sale this coming December.

People often look at life expectancy statistics and assume that people died at the age of 46 in 1900 because medical care was poor and that people seldom lived past age 46. In fact, anyone reaching the age of 46 in 1900 was probably as likely to reach age 75 or 80 or even 95 as someone is today. Life expectancy is an average, and children more often died of diseases and then-untreatable infections and pneumonia. Families died from eating tainted food or because their water system was poisoning them. People also died at work more often, but that has changed in the last hundred years.

Throughout the world, life expectancy has reached at least age 70 and this is not due to miraculous “medical breakthroughs.” Infant mortality has dropped. Children do not die from “childhood diseases” as they once did. Life expectancy in the United States has increased since 1900 almost entirely due to untainted food and clean drinking water in the early 20th century, and more recently with vaccinations and antibiotics. Employers are required to protect workers from fire, toxins, machinery.

Medical care at end of life has had only a minor impact on life expectancy, adding months at best.

More recently cancer treatments are improved and fewer people smoke. Life expectancy in the United States actually went down recently for several years in a row mostly due to suicide and drug overdoses. This past year it ticked up again as people recognized the obvious about addictive painkillers.

But the news is not all good.

Dying from infection or measles is extremely rare in our country, but we all live with many more toxins introduced to the air and food and water than people were exposed to before the industrial revolution. Skin and other cancers, asthma, and allergies have dramatically increased. Some of these deaths from disease may ironically be attributed to longer life—those who might have died of infection a hundred years ago now live long enough to die of cancer, for example—but this does not explain the post WW2 escalation.

Rereading The Silent Spring might remind us how use of pesticides and factory farms has impacted the quality of our food and air and water. The actual chemistry of our meat has changed. New varieties of animal and vegetable foods have been bred to store or ship better, or to fatten more quickly. (The way hogs are being raised in our country really does not bear thinking about. If you witnessed it firsthand, it’s likely bacon would lose all appeal,) Most large American cities and most small ones have toxins in their public water systems. Results of water quality tests are accessible online and generally show water in “acceptable” range, with minute amounts of disinfection by-products, naturally occurring and manmade additives and other not-always-safe contaminates measured in parts per billion.  I cannot help wondering about the lifelong accumulated impact of even tiny amounts of toxins in water, food, and air. How much might all this contribute to sensitivity expressed in allergies? How much contributes to cancer?

It is not my area of expertise, but I cannot help wondering. What does not kill you may poison you slowly.

There was snow in the hills the other day.

I completed the shawls yesterday with the third, the wild one with splashy turquoises and golds and greens. My photos never do them justice.

My orchid is blooming for the second time. I must be doing something right.