1More Homesteading Update - Fuzzy Slippers

The last time Charleston saw this much snow the Berlin wall had just come down.

It appears our family relocated to the Lowcountry with not much more than each other to build our new sustainable life of independence just before a season of record rain, cold and snow.

Gold medal.

We put the kids to bed last night, sat down with books and drinks and were quietly enjoying the snowfall. Out the front window, our 100-watt earth killer on the porch cast a more beautiful glow on the accumulation beneath the trees in the national forest than any number of Al Gore's GE flourescents could dream of. Then, it went out.

My thoughts immediately went to the kids. A double wide in the woods isn't much better than a cardboard box downtown when the power goes, and we're just a couple years shy of the off-grid 10KW solar rig. Moreover, it certainly didn't make for an axiety-free mental gear shift having just settled in to chapter five of One Second After.

So, the kids. It's ten o'clock and I need to keep them warm for the next, gulp, ten hours or so. After that we can pile in the car and bug out if need be. I hooked a space heater up to my commercial 12V battery, but the Sam's Club inverter couldn't handle the current. Fire it is. What a blessing that we moved into a dwelling constructed against the better advice of not putting fire places in mobile homes. We had some dry logs under plastic outside, but I'd neglected to replenish the kindling. Looking around desperately for anything DRY and INDOORS that could serve as kindling (rolled newspaper? old easter baskets? the cat?) I decided it was time to go outside. We live in a swamp that has seen the most rain it's seen since 1941, and the snow wasn't helping, but if I could find some downed branches I had enough paper to get them dried out. But that still meant I had to go outside. Did I mention we live in a swamp?

So I traded the fuzzy slippers for my water proof work boots and an AR-15 (the closest thing with a flashlight on it...really) and headed into the woods. To add injury to injury I broke the middle finger on my right hand two days ago, so most of the wood gathering was truly a single-handed operation. But after a few sloshy trips through the mud and leaves I had enough kindling for the night.

Then it hit me.

I'm in the middle of 590,000 acres of national forest at night. I'm in the freezing cold. I'm in a region unused to and unequipped for snow and currently suffering blackout. I'm gathering firewood for my family in my pajamas with a broken finger and a military pattern battle rifle strapped to my back. I'm precisely where I need to be.

After we moved here in August, we had six of the hardest months of our life together. There were challenges that we were certain we wouldn't make it through. But we did. We wondered if the the things we were facing were God's way of telling us we'd made a mistake moving our family here. We wondered if the new life we were trying to create was spitting us out and telling us to go home. Then it hit us. We are home.

We could have seen the snow as just another hardship. It made the firewood soggy. It made the house cold. It made the driveway soup. But it was beautiful and that's how we'll remember it. We received it like a gift. Sometimes a gesture of welcome is only distinguished from one of rejection by the response of the recipient.