They’ve seen Winter as a direct force of mortality and had loved ones plucked from them by its icy grasp. They lost babies to drought in baking Summers and knew that starvation was just around the corner at any moment if they made a mistake in their planting. My Lakota predecessors were driven from the Dakotas by soldiers, sent fleeing across the country only with what they could hold. My German family is from the Neander Valley where the struggle between Cro-magnon and Neanderthal may have ended. The Thirty Year War was kinda rough too.
They’ve done all of this, and yet today _I_ had to carry a cup of coffee all the way to another coffee station WITHOUT one of those little cardboard sleeves that keeps your hand comfortable. The place where I made my coffee was out of them so I had to go elsewhere and I swear, it was kinda uncomfortable for most of the half-minute it took to get there.