Spring                                          Waxing Flower Moon

At the recycling place I pushed in flattened box after flattened box, a layered batch of cardboard going back to late November, another step in the home as retailer, receiving goods directly from middle-folk like Levenger, Amazon and Williams-Sonoma.  Another instance of disintermediation these flattened boxes could serve as both metaphor and symbol of an age shifting old patterns of store fronts and even big box stores to the home, ironically moving back to the days of the Sears Catalog and Montgomery Wards catalog stores.

In many ways the home is now the hub that a business district used to be.  We pick up our mail and some of us our newspapers and magazines off a computer screen.  We watch movies mailed to us by Netflix or streamed directly into our TV’s by wireless routers.  We shop on the internet and have things delivered to our home instead of driving to a store, picking them out and doing self-delivery.  An increasing percentage of us now move from bed to office without the interference of a commute.  In some instances, like vegetable and flower growing, another percentage of the population has started growing their own.  Others keep bees, raise chickens, some have goats.

The times have changed and they have changed in dramatic ways, but like the fabled frog in the pot of boiling water, the changes have proceeded at such a deliberate pace that we scarcely notice all of them.

The cell phone, too, has replaced the landline at home, the old familiar location centered phone call having gone the way of crank phones.

Those of us who are aging will benefit a great deal from most if not all of these changes.  We can look forward, I think, to certain tele-conferenced medical services, perhaps rugs that know when we fall.

Home has become more like a subsistence farm without the subsistence level life style.  Again, at least for some.