I think it was T.S. Eliot who wrote that the world would end in ice, not fire and that it would go out with a whimper rather than a bang. He was more prophet than poet because when things came to a stop, when life as we knew it ended, it was without warning.

Life in the early 21st century was moving along as it had and we thought it would be forever. We rose in the morning to comfort, cooked our ready made breakfast in the microwave oven, took a warm shower and drove many miles to work in our cars, singing along to the music we loved and waving at the other drivers. On the drive to work -- we called it a commute -- we might take a few moments to admire the first flowers of spring or the blazing colors of autumn leaves but our thoughts turned mostly toward work.

We talked on cell phones as we drove and no one, not man, woman, or child, was without a phone in hand. At work, we sat at desks beneath brilliant lighting and did our work on computers, lazy and complacent.

Food was not all prepared over open fires or in wood stoves stolen from somewhere three decades or more ago.  Food did not have to be killed or collected or preserved.

By the end, most of us were so self-indulged, so spoiled that we bought our food prepared to heat at home or ate in restaurants where someone else prepared it. When I tell that to the grandchildren they laugh, certain that Grandmammy has gone silly in her old age because a place where you paid someone to provide cooked food is impossible in their life.

I told them once of buffets, of the massive restaurants that had multiple bars of various foods and their eyes went wide, round and huge. Descriptions of things like Szechwan beef defy description and large quantities of food are beyond imagining. Long before their birth, the remaining store of things like sugar, coffee, and oatmeal were gone, culled from the supermarket shelves.

I am old now and my journey long past. After I am gone, maybe they will remember and tell the story. It might become a myth, a legend that lives on to share around the hearth for generations to come. I hope so.

Something should remain, some scrap of all we had as Americans should be kept to remember the golden years when gasoline flowed like an endless river and we were laughing people on the move.

It is cold now inside the old farmhouse, the winds make me shiver and rain drips through the holes in the roof. I will poke up the fire one last time and go to bed to dream of the plenty that we knew that was lost before we realized it was gone.