“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light,” Ma considered. “We didn’t lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of.”  — Laura Ingalls Wilder, “The Long Winter”

Winter sometimes seems to be an unbroken chain of identical days before the weather takes a turn and surprises us.

This morning, I awoke to snowflakes drifting slowly down, a sheer, white curtain against a pine-green drape. Nuthatches, titmice, finches and chickadees are at the feeder as I write, scrambling for what little is left after a pair of desperately cold days.

The pipes froze yesterday, and a friend’s husband volunteered a big propane space heater that eventually did the trick. While it doesn’t happen often, it never fails to test my mettle and bring out the worst in me. Being without water is akin to being without heat or light, and as luck would have it, I was also out of the bottled product. What little of it I had was contained in a single drinking glass and one plastic bottle, and the thought of having to melt snow didn’t appeal to me at all. Fortunately, help came in time, and I didn’t have to resort to that as I sometimes have in the past.

During the December 2008 ice storm, my survival skills were really put to the test, as I, and many others like me, had to make do with what we had. Amidst the steady roar of generators cranking away in neighboring back yards, I plodded on through five cold, dark, dry days, staying close to the woodstove, melting snow for water, and lugging it up from the spring in buckets for the unpleasant task of keeping the toilet water as clear as I could. I closed rooms off, cooked on the woodstove, and kept milk and other perishables in the snow on the back porch. And by nightfall, which happened at around 5 p.m., I was hard-pressed to find something to do by what weak light I had to do it by. My eyesight no longer being what it once was, it wasn’t long before the weak glow from either a flashlight or a kerosene lamp did me in, so I had no choice but to sit in the dark with just my thoughts and the cats for company or go to bed and pray for the swift return of daylight.

In retrospect, I made many small discoveries during that long stretch without power. I realized quickly that, without a generator, I had no choice but to resign myself to the situation and to call upon stored skills and an equally generous store of forbearance to be able to tolerate not being able to take a shower, pour myself a glass of cold tap water, do laundry, wash dishes, watch TV, flush the toilet, listen to the radio, write emails, or read long into the night. All the extra tasks had to be accomplished during the day, and I came to know the value of a single gallon of water. After awhile, I began wondering less when the power would be restored and focusing more on solutions to small problems that, under normal circumstances, aren’t problems at all. When it did finally come back on, I noticed that I had to retrain myself, after even such a short stint of deprivation, to turn the faucet on, to put bread in the toaster instead of on top of the woodstove, and to reach into the fridge for milk instead of walking out onto the back porch.

I developed from all this a new respect for my ancestors who had to rely on water drawn and carried from a well, spring or stream and who wasted very little of it, who had to read, study, mend clothes or write by candle or lamplight, and who spent the bulk of their lives producing or otherwise obtaining however they could all that they needed to survive. Unlike now, when a power failure forces us to streamline our own habits, their lives weren’t tests of endurance at all, for it was all they knew. What is to us a challenge was simply, for them, a way of life, based wholly on an instinctive knowledge that has never quite left us and that bears testing every so often.

— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.