Indoor Plumbing

Despite the title, I'm not really going to discuss indoor plumbing, except to say how much I love it. There. That's it. And of course, I need to say also that every time I think about indoor plumbing, I think how lucky I am, and how lucky we all are. Because indoor plumbing is one of the many wonderful inventions and developments that make us all wealthy. Once, indoor plumbing was unimagined, then an unimagined luxury, then an unaffordable luxury...and gradually it has become something nobody thinks about.

There are so many things that we just no longer bother thinking about, it boggles the mind. How about central heating. No more drafty fires pulling the warm air from the room and leaving you sitting so close to the fire that you toast on one side and freeze on the other - if you were rich enough to get a roaring fire going in the first place. Electricity. God Bless all of you hard-working, now-dead scientists and your sometimes crackpot theories that have allowed me to plug in my bread maker and ipod. How about windows? Glass has been around for centuries, but it wasn't until 1902 that Irving Colburn patented a process to mass produce windows. Let's face it, sitting in a warm, well-lighted room is nice, but looking out from the warm, well-lighted room to the cold, cold winter outside does make one feel just a little more snugly and blessed. And finally, and recently, a big shout-out to the creator of the memory foam mattress pad. Every night when I get into bed and stretch out on my cushy, slightly resistant memory foam mattress pad, I think to myself, what a wonderful world. And it is, when you stop to think about it.