There are so many- and in so many different eras and in so many different scenarios... Yesterday I had coffee with an acquaintance and she told me about her grandfather.

During the Great Depression he lived with his wife and 12 children on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. They had 16 acres where they grew just about everything imaginable and which supplied most of their needs. He butchered chickens and his wife peddled them to businesses in Seattle; they also sold their excess eggs. This was almost their sole source of income.

He was a schoolteacher by vocation and had started a school on the island, which he kept on teaching even after they no longer had the money to pay him. He taught for more than four years without pay.

There are many similar stories, I know. I also know that if needs be, we - and that includes our young, spoiled children- could and would do it again. The young'uns might make harder work out of it than they did a couple of generations ago, because of having such different expectations of life- but they would do it.