Meeting Challenges/Why I Write

Ready for a Challenge!

I thought I was well prepared for cold weather and was not surprised on Monday morning to learn that the outdoor temperature was a frigid three degrees Fahrenheit, not expected to rise above 10 degrees by afternoon. After all, that’s what the forecast had shown in preceding days. And it is January in northern Michigan. So, from under the bedcovers, with coffee and book and dog at hand, it seemed like a pretty ordinary winter morning until, finally, I noticed that the bedroom was colder than it should be, the house unusually quiet. Why wasn’t the furnace blower coming on? Up to investigate! Only 45 degrees in the living room? Even I am not that frugal! 

 

Four days earlier I’d checked the outdoor propane tank and called to order a refill, but no way could I have gone through 20% of a tank in four days! Checked the circuit breaker box. No problem there. Emergency call to my furnace guy (had to leave a message), and then Sunny and I went out for a very short, quick run. As snow quickly turned to ice between her paw pads, she gave me no argument about cutting short out first sortie of the day.

I won’t go through my Monday morning hour-by-hour but instead will cut directly to the chase to say that the furnace guy found the propane tank was empty, after all. I’d probably gotten a false reading from the gauge, he said, sharing that his home tank gauge had once read zero when the tank turned out to be 85% full. I called for propane delivery once again, explaining the emergency situation, and by 12:30 p.m. my house was on its way back to normal. By 2:30 the chicken I’d planned to cook in the big cast iron pot, braising with it vegetables, was at last underway, and I’d managed to read almost 40 pages of Eig’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., much of that reading accomplished—before the propane delivery—with a sleeping bag over my legs, throw around my shoulders, wool scarf around my neck, and knitted cap on my head. 

 

Life lesson: No one is coming to save us. Now that’s not 100% true, is it? After all, the furnace guy came, and the propane delivery came, and my goose would have been cooked—no, frozen!—without them. But, no one made the calls for me or unearthed the space heaters to aim at pipes under kitchen and bathroom sinks or filled the bathtub and kitchen sink and washing machine with hot water to keep things under control until the situation was resolved. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth wouldn’t have gotten any of those jobs done. Wishin’ and hopin’ and dreamin’ would not have accomplished a thing.

 

People are often asked what advice they would give to their younger selves, if such a thing were possible. I’d say, “Cowgirl up! What’s the first step? Take it! Then take it from there.” 

 

When someone says “Cowgirl Up!” it means rise to the occasion, don’t give up, and do it all without whining. [Source of quote online here.]

 

Sometimes, honestly, the first step is hard to see. What does need doing? What should I do? For me, even if I can’t see right away the first step to resolve a particular situation, there’s always something that needs doing. It may be completely unrelated, but experience has taught me (I only wish it hadn’t taken so long!) that doing anything constructive, even if it’s nothing more than cleaning the bathtub, makes me feel more effective, more capable in general, and that staves off the paralysis of helplessness and hopelessness. 

 

That’s probably the reason I keep writing these blog posts, these little-noticed bits of thought that I toss out into the great uncharted ocean of humanity, like messages in bottles, without knowing if they will ever even make landfall. Writing is something I feel capable of doing, and when I do it, I feel more capable of dealing with life in general. 

Strength comes from dreams, too.