It's a clean life, if you don't weaken

My mother-in-law used to say, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.” I think it’s an old Irish saying. It definitely sounds like something the Irish would come up with — a truism that’s somehow both positive and depressing at once. They nailed it.

I wrote last week about my water issues, as in I don’t have any water flowing to my house.

I could write volumes about how that affects your daily life, but I’ll just throw out a few words to prompt you to write it in your head for me: shower, laundry, cooking, cleaning and “I’m just going to rinse this off quick-like.” (That last one makes me laugh hysterically. It seems like the most trivial item in the list, but it’s the one that’s the most annoying to me.)

Think about how you interact with your water throughout the day.

Do you know how much water it takes to flush a toilet? Drive down the block to a neighbor’s house, use a hose to fill a 5-6 gallon jug with water, drive home, unload it into your house, fill a 2-3 gallon bucket from that water supply, then pour the water into the toilet bowl — and for cryin’ out loud don’t just dump it in there. You have to pour it in so you get that swirl going — and then note the fact that you used about half your water supply to flush the toilet. Once.

You’ll use the rest of it to wash dishes after you heat the water in pots on the stove. Clean every surface you possibly can before the water gets cold and murky. You don’t know when you’ll get another chance at this.

Don’t mess with dirty clothes just go to the laundry-mat. And bathing? I’ll tell you how lucky I am with that in a minute, but for now I just want to point out that I don’t know how pioneer women survived.

I mean, I do know technically how they survived, but I can’t imagine doing it myself. I really think that if the pioneer women spent one day with running water, that they didn’t have to think about other than turning a knob, inside their homes, they would kill for it. Kill. Possibly trade some of their children, too, good healthy one even to sweeten the deal.

My husband and I have been lucky because we do have access to a functioning toilet in the shop. It’s about a city block length away, most if it open to winter so you have to plan ahead. But you push the handle down and water magically appears and swirls away. That’s beats hauling that water, and using an outhouse.

Boy genius that he is, my husband installed a water heater and lines and rigged up a shower over the floor drain in the shop. Showering is a little frontier adventure, but, again, I turn a handle and running water comes out, hot water.

The first few days of showering were, let’s say, rustic by today’s standards, with a garden hose and nozzle in the open air of a 40-by-40 shop heated to about 55 degrees. But I was clean again under glorious, running, hot water and if not in my home, at least within walking distance of it. A line of the in-floor heat ran right under where we stood — you cannot imagine how something simple seems like a gift. A heated tent is a miracle.

Now I have a luxurious 4-by-8 heated shower tent, decked out with a chair and a stand for the showering accoutrement. Every night, the dog follows me to the shop and lays outside the tent on my floor mat, while the cat patrols the perimeter. Solidarity. Even though they just roll in the dirt and lick off the worst of it for a bath, they are there for me.

I’m assuming we will survive hauling jugs of water to our house until the ground thaws and the construction equipment arrives to dig a new water line. Most days I don’t think about killing anyone to get running water before spring — because I haven’t weakened.

But the winter ain’t over yet.

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I have to walk uphill both ways in 5 feet of snow to the shower and back. That’s how the story will be told in 30 years at [email protected].