History Memes

My parents were born and raised in the wilderness and they thrived there most of the time. But they also reminded us that their lives were very precarious. Mom had an uncle that died as a child because he ate the wrong plant. Dad had a relative die of infection from cutting their hand with an axe. Both of them remember a period in the 1950s when they were children when a famine occurred in the wilderness when animals literally disappeared everywhere - it's a natural phenomenon where animal populations rise and fall over periods of years or decades. The animals in the forest just disappear, birds migrate elsewhere and even fish stocks deplete. It's not so much from overhunting, it's just a cyclical thing that happens due to weather, environment, disease or other factors. When animals grow scarce in the wild due to natural cycles, people just starve. Dad had stories of seeing people boil hide moccasins to make a soup just to eat anything. Women became so frail they couldn't produce breast milk anymore so they resorted to spoon feeding babies fish broth.

So they were both always quick to mind me and my siblings .... life is good today, no matter how bad you think it might be.