After packing all the ingredients for tonight’s dinner into the crockpot, and scrubbing the sinks, then making myself a cup of tea, I find myself, today, thinking about all the things that we humans do that sustain us — and yet that disappear almost as soon as they are done. 

These are the tasks that women have often performed through the ages — or people who belong to the laboring classes — or people who are marginalized in some other way.  They are not the things that make up what we call our history, that’s for sure.  And yet without them, we would not exist — nor would history.

I wonder why these tasks — these sustaining things that disappear — are not more valued.  These are the things that make up the warp and woof our lives.  The countless meals that have been prepared and eaten through the millennia, the stone walls built around ancient pastures, the cornfields planted and harvested, the laundry done.

Somehow it seems that these things become invisible while history perches atop them, preening and maybe a little pompous — a little self-satisfied — a little self-important, perhaps? 

What is real history?  Is it marked by special events that pop up – occasional volcanic islands in the vast and roiling oceans of our common lives?  Or is it made of the everyday activities that have kept our human civilizations going through the ages? 

I’m sure it’s some combination of the two — and as I smell the wafting aroma of my cooking dinner, I pat myself on the back for my small contribution to human history.