Damn Awful Cold!!
Surviving a mid-winter power outage.
5:30 am, September 20, the morning daylight has yet to awaken but I can barely make out a glistening, white frozen backyard. I open the door to let the dog out and can see shadows of all my beautiful flowers slumped over, heavy with frost. Peppers in the garden that had promised their perfect green fruits are now shriveled and brown under the weight of the cold. It seems like a cruel joke that mother nature has pranked us with as the sun comes on the scene laughing at me through it’s brilliant cold comfort. This is upper Michigan, expect the unexpected!
As I stand in front of the open door admiring Mother Natures handiwork, my bare toes tingle from an icy breeze. “Your prank is too early, and it’s not funny,” I think to myself. I close the door and let the dog do what a dog’s gotta do. My mind takes over and wanders to another time and another place we were caught off guard.
Standing on the cold floor near the door my brain pulls out a file for me to revisit of one of the most irritating things about being without power or heat is trying to sleep when your feet are cold. My brain file opens to a scene of a really cold March night, geez about 25 years ago now, our antique oil furnace quit working at 1am. It happened to be a Sunday morning. Of course, it was the weekend, that is when this stuff happens, right? To make matters worse, it happened to be the coldest damn March in the history of our area. The air temperature dropped to -30 that night into the early morning with the wind so strong it rattled the windows of this old cabin. Icy pellets tapping the windows is what woke me up. It was Mother Natures way of letting me know a lesson was about to commence.
The kids were all tucked into their beds and were unaware that the heat was out, luckily. We were caught totally off guard, we had no electric blankets or any other source of heating. No woodstove, no kerosene heater, no nothing. I don’t know how long since the furnace quit working but the indoor temperature dropped so low that even the bowl of dogs water on the kitchen floor began to ice over. What we learned that night and what we did was one of the best learning experiences we’ve had to date.
Being far from the madding crowd, we had a choice of electric stove or propane stove in the kitchen. I am sooo very glad this place came with a propane appliance. It saved our hides that frightful night!
I scrounge around in the kitchen cupboards in search of mason jars with tight fitting lids while water was heating on the stove. Once the water was hot I poured it into the jars and put the lids on tight. Next I wrapped the hot jars of water with kitchen towels. I quietly snuck into each of the kids bedrooms and placed a jar under their blankets. My dears stayed warm until they woke up late the that morning. Of course, screaming at the cold as soon as their warm tooties hit the very, very cold floor.
We couldn’t get a repairman out to our place until Tuesday. This is the U.P. after all and things just didn’t go as quickly in the backwoods back then as they did in town, so we had to make do. When the repairman did get here, he informed us it was a clogged oil filter that had caused us to go without heat during the coldest two days of our lives.
Some of the things I learned living in this beautiful, inhospitable landscape is that you can’t take Mother Nature for granted. She will spank you hard if you do! And we got spanked that cold March weekend. So, I went out and dropped some bucks on survival stuff.
Every family member got their own wool knitted cap, wool socks, and their own hot water bottle. I stocked up on handwarmers from the hunting section at Walmart and everyone got a new sleeping bag. Putting two little kids in a sleeping bag keeps them warmer together, or a dog will work too, if you have one. Also, those shiny silver emergency space blankets placed under the fitted bottom sheet of their bed will help keep body heat from escaping through a draft under the bed. Another trick I learned was to wrap a large wool scarf around your midsection. These are called *kidney wraps.* They will keep your core body warm and cozy.
Eventually, we moved. The new place didn’t have electricity or plumbing for the first year, but it did have a woodstove in it. More trials and tribulations, like hauling water but we’ve had fun. The kids grew up and moved to their own places. The best part is they will take with them the lessons of Mother Nature to help them survive whatever gets thrown at them from the coming uncertain future ahead of us.