A great relief

With great relief we welcomed the return of electrical power this morning. We had been without electricity for four days and made do with a propane camp stove, a gasoline- powered generator, and a wood-burning stove. We were among the lucky ones who had generators and wood stoves, because we were able to keep our refrigerator operating and we kept the house nice and warm. We couldn't take showers or do laundry and god help me, I had to revert to washing dishes by hand with water heated up on the wood stove. It took me back to the days on the farm where we not only had to heat the water on the stove, but we had to carry the water into the house in buckets and lug the wood in by the armful. It seems to me that bringing in the wood and water was a chore allotted to the younger members of the family, anyway I remember pumping the water when I was short enough that I had to jump up to get the pump handle down again. Pumping water into the tank for the cows to drink from was a chore no one wanted to do. About half the time the cows would tip the tank over and spill all of their drinking water onto the ground.
We came out lucky from this power outage, although our electrical wall heater now does not turn on, and we had to drag out our little portable heater, which actually does a pretty good job of heating the living room and kitchen. We lost no food and the hot water heater seems to be working O.K. Sometimes a surge of power will wreck appliances, but we had everything protected except the heater. Why we didn't unplug it I will never know. We both forgot about it.
During the outage, we could step outside and hear generators chugging away all up and down the street. There was much visiting back and forth between the neighbors as the more knowledgeable ones helped the beginners adjust the choke and fuel systems to keep the generators running smoothly. Even so, it was noisier than usual around here!