Learning to Live Again

“To find your self, Think for your self.”

Socrates

Living in town you have so many comforts that you may not even realize. You walk into a room and flip on a light, turn on the water to wash your hands, and turn the knob to your stove to heat the pan you are about to throw the hamburger into. The hamburger you just defrosted in minutes in your microwave.
You think nothing of it until your lights flicker out during a dark gloomy storm and your electricity goes out. You fumble around looking for your flashlight if you’re lucky. At last resort, you grab the candle you only use for the ambiance that sits in the dining room and tries to remember where you put that dang lighter you just saw while cleaning a week or so ago.
This was our reality for the first year we lived out on the ranches. Of course, we knew where the lighter was, we used it to light the stove, fireplace and the lamps we would light every night before Phill got home to start the generator.
Water the greatest thing I remember happening in the early days is when we finally had the water pump going and we had running water from the faucets in our trailer. We no longer had to walk out to grab buckets of water to do dishes, cook, or flush the toilet.
That meat you just popped in the microwave. We sat it in the oven so the dogs wouldn’t eat it while it defrosted throughout the day. Then cooked it not always on the stove but when it was warm enough, we learned to cook on the fire pit. This wasn’t extremely new to us we had been camping our entire lives, but we fine-tuned the fire cooking experience.
In all honesty, living off-grid was in no way easy we learned to do laundry the right way and the wrong way. We learned to winterize was a little more difficult then we had imagined and staying warm was no cup of tea.
We all learned to live again. Our children gained application for the world around them. The greatest part we learned the seclusion was amazing and worth all the learning experiences we would go through over the years to come.