In recent days, I’ve begun exploring the possibility of living out the rest of my life as a Bush woman. You know her.

She lives in the woods, dries her clothes by sunlight and gets dinner with a shotgun or fishing pole.

I think I may have to start looking for locations in:

1) The Tundra

2) Boreal Forest

3) Some little nook along the Trans Canada Highway

4) The Kunigami area of Okinawa, where there are real tree house

I haven’t decided yet.

I guess I should explain my reasons for exploring life as a Bush woman. It has to do with a desire to get back to nature and more importantly, for health reasons. Four consecutive events in the last fourteen days have inspired me to investigate a happy future in the Tundra.

Event One:

I opened a brand-new package of deodorant. It had one label on top of another label. I tore off the first label. It said, “Do not use this if you have Kidney Problems.”

I thought to myself, “What on earth could they have put in this deodorant that would affect someone’s kidneys? What is in this deodorant?”

Unfortunately, I kept using it for several days until I made alternate arrangements. What was I going to do? Just go without deodorant and put an ad on match.com that I’m looking for a man who likes that earth mother aroma?

Not that I’m using Match.com. I tried it about ten years ago and met a guy from Jamaica. After about three messages, he started referring to me as his “sugar plum.” I didn’t really like being called sugar plum so early in the relationship. So my foray into online dating lasted three emails.

Moving on.

Event two:

I was being cheap, and visited three stores to comparison shop before purchasing a bottle of vanilla.

The second store had an expensive brand. I decided to look at the ingredients to make sure that the ingredients in the next store were the same.

When I got to the third store, the price was right. This made me forgot to look at the ingredients and compare. When I got home and started comparing the old and new vanilla, I made a startling discovery. Vanilla doesn’t always have any vanilla in it.

At Store two, the expensive brand, the vanilla had vanilla extract. The two brands in my house didn’t have any vanilla in them. They had a concoction of ingredients designed to give you that vanilla smell, but no actual vanilla. They also had propylene glycol, which last time I checked was an ingredient in antifreeze.

Event three:

Later that same night, I noticed an old bottle of coffee whitener in the cupboard. I thought to myself, “Well, if vanilla doesn’t have to have vanilla, I wonder what’s in coffee whitener?” I didn’t even bother reading the ingredients. I’m just going to assume coffee whitener’s main ingredient is bleach. After all, it whitens socks, so why not coffee? I don’t really drink coffee and the whitener is not mine, so I figured I’d just leave that unsolved mystery alone and avoid any more startling discoveries.

But alas, event four was waiting for me.

I saw an ad for a new product called Simponi. This commercial propelled me straight into the Tundra Forest and my life as a Bush woman.

In the commercial, it actually says one of the side effects of using Simponi is Cancer. That’s right. It can treat arthritis, but one of the side effects is cancer.

After viewing the Simponi Commercial, I decided that the pleasures/products of modern life have lost their thrill. Deodorant that affects your kidneys, vanilla without vanilla, coffee whitening through whatever means and arthritis meds that may cause Cancer. I am beginning to think that I am not benefiting from the Industrial Revolution.

This is ridiculous.

Ah, how nice it would be just to be able to eat some nice healthy organic food without any antifreeze ingredients in it! My life in the Tundra could be so awesome. I’d wake up at 6 a.m. to a brisk walk in the fresh morning air.

Then, around noon, I’d Kill my pet rooster Spunky for lunch. Then, I'd fish and forage for dinner. I’d probably make friends with another rooster on the way down to the river and just call him Spunky too. He’d never know I call all of them Spunky. It would be great. But it’s a little scary that I’m daydreaming about living in the Tundra with a pet rooster.

I don’t know what else to do. Life used to be much simpler before all these modern, toxic conveniences. Growing up in Jamaica, a milkman delivered milk from his cow to my grandmother. It was a modern, developed neighborhood too, but he sold milk door to door. Our relatives in the country grew their own dinner.

When did we move from this simple organic natural lifestyle to selling poison on store shelves?? I’m done. I can’t write about this anymore. If you can’t find me, check the woods. Oh, and by the way: Bush woman seeking Mountain man with his own camping equipment. Should be able to handle himself if confronted with a bear and can only call me sugar plum after 10 dates.

This article was originally published on November 8, 2010.
Obsolete links from the original article have been removed where applicable.