Jumping for joy
(I know Mark has already told you some of
this, but it's so momentous I wanted to post about it too!)
Mark and I finally got away from the farm Wednesday to visit my family
in Bristol. When we got home, we were thrilled to see the
powerline back in place atop its poles! We scurried into the
trailer...only to discover that the juice was still off.
Remember how I
lost faith on day 1 of the outage? Now it was Mark's
turn. When the electricity was still off on Thursday morning, I
could see his spirits plummeting into his (cold, wet) boots. It
was too rainy outside to heat anything up on the wood stove for lunch,
so we shivered in the kitchen, eating cold chicken sandwiches and
bemoaning our fate.
Then I gasped.
"Oh, no!" Mark responded. "What's wrong now?"
Speechless, I pointed down the hall to where our CFL had flickered into
light. "Look, Mark! Electricity!!!!!!"
We stared in rapture at the glowing bulb for a couple of minutes, then
jumped into action. Mark plugged in the stove fan and freezer
while I started up the fridge and internet. I turned on the
drinking water pump and filled
up our emergency milk jugs of water, then we headed out to pump
water from the creek to fill the thousand
gallon washing-water tank. (We'd been caught, very
unfortunately, with it nearly completely empty, which really made the
outage more difficult than it should have been.)
Next, Mark plugged in the
golf cart while I filled pots of water to heat on the stove.
Near instant hot water, and plenty of it! After skimping for
nearly two weeks, washing each day's dishes in a scant gallon of melted
snow, I was so
excited that I filled our sink with gallons and gallons worth, even
though there weren't really that many dishes.
Before I was able to calm down enough to check my email, I had to twirl
around outside in the snow, singing at the top of my lungs,
"Elec-tri-ci-ty! Light! Heat! Water!"
My weather-forecaster buddy warns that bitter cold weather is on its
way tonight, with all next week slated to stay below freezing.
Right at this instant, though, I can't muster any doom and gloom at all.
This post is part of our Two Weeks Without Electricity series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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