A Small Success

About four winters ago our water line froze on us right around the Christmas season. As you can imagine, where we live, there is no "city water works" and thus no one to call when something goes wrong.  We spent most of the winter eating cheese and crackers (no dishes to do), having bucket baths (pretty much self descriptive), and hauling water up from the lake in 50 gallon buckets, 5 gallon buckets, and any other size of buckets we could get our hands on.  During that period of three waterless months, Neil and I hauled ourselves up the waterline most days to build fires to thaw the ground enough to dig down to the waterline. We would find frozen sections, dig them out thaw them with a tiger torch. A couple of times we even got the water going but couldn't keep up with it. It kept freezing ahead of where we had dug and replaced lines. It was a long, cold, and yes - a very wet - winter.

So you can just imagine my chagrin when I got out of the hospital last month, excited to be going home to recuperate, to find WHAT - you guessed it. No water!! Thank god I had Melanie (my lovely sister) with me. After spending a couple of hours trouble-shooting all the possibilities, we resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to have to go back "to the old ways". Getting enough snow melted (one big stock pot of snow resulted in a meager 2 inches of water in the bottom of the pot) to do dishes, flush the toilet, maintain some semblance of hygiene for ourselves, and some very basic cleaning, was a chore. And which, unfortunately for Melanie, it all fell on her. I was completely unable to help given my new and very foreign position of depending on someone else to do just about everything for me. And when Melanie went home, my good friend Mary Lou from Victoria very bravely came out to take over the chores (despite my warning that it would be very much like "winter camping"). And as the days passed, and fresh snow came down, the job of getting good clean snow became more difficult. Seems Zack (our dog) thought of the whole yard as his own private outhouse.

When Neil got home on the 22nd of January, he was determined to find where the water had frozen and get it back. And I was agreeable to the new mission. Laundry was piling up, floors were getting very dirty (no 5 second rule here!), and the bucket baths were getting old quickly! (Although we did beg showers from good friends at the lake -Thank you Sandy!!)

And then we got the bombshell of my diagnosis. For a couple of days, everything in our lives stopped while we tried to digest the news, what it meant for our lives for the next couple of years, and how to deal with it. Once the decision was made to go to Victoria, we both kind of went into denial and threw ourselves into getting our water. Like really - as if we didn't have a million other things to do before packing up and moving?? But, it gave us something to do, time to NOT think. And probably for both of us, to go into our own private world of "what ifs" (not a productive state of mind, I assure you). So we did, we threw ourselves into plowing the road up the water line, hauling truck loads of wood,  burning massive fires, and then digging in the most likely spots it would be frozen. But we found it!!!

At the beginning of the week, we had water!!! Maybe not such a great accomplishment, but for us it was HUGE. It just showed how plugging away, one day at a time, good things DO happen. (Plus, we got our laundry done!!)