Anniversay of Y2K

Reading the editorials in the Greenville News this morning,, I noted with interest the it was the anniversary of Y2K. This started me down memory road and I felt compelled to put my musings in writing.

My mother-in-law was obsessed with Y2K preparations. She started more than a year in advance preparing for the event. Borrowed my food dehydrator to dry fruit the summer of 1999. Asked me to save gallon milk jugs to store water in.

My mother-in-law actually got mad at me because I was not doing the same. When I told her that I trusted to God to take care us, she blasted me with her opinion that God gave us common sense to make preparations. I know she was convinced that we would be moving in with her to survive due to my inadequacies in not making preparations because I found many food items that she could not have consumed being diabetic. Nestle Quick cannisters, cookies, sugary cereals, the list goes on and on.

The saddest part of this story is that we had no idea of the depth of her hoarding. In September of 2009, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer. By the end of the year, she knew it was terminal and had made the decision to discontinue the chemo treatments. Y2K came and went without the dire consequences that had been predicted. My mother-in-law never once mentioned the subject (at least in my prescence) again.

She died in June 2000 and when we had to start cleaning out the basement, the absolute waste overwhelmed me. Many things like batteries, lamp oil wicks, canned goods were salvageable. But items like crackers, cereal, tea bags, etc. were so stale by that time that they had to be discarded. We found a order sheet for a grain grinder that thankfully had never been sent in. Under the stairwell in the basement, we had to haul out 12 five gallon containers of whole oat grain. They disappeared from the side of the road where we put them so maybe someone put them to good use. We counted 180 gallons of water, which we did carry home and use to water plants and the garden.

If she would have just swallowed her pride and brought herself to admit that all the food supplies were now unneeded, we could have hauled it all to a food bank or church for distribution to people who were in need of it.

I guess she knew she would not be the one dealing with all of it, maybe she no longer cared given her health situation. Only God knows what was in her heart at that point in time.....