Snow & Rain Day 3

by Rachel KennerlyFebruary 17, 20214 min read

Today the water went out around 6 am. It was working at 5:30 am, then stopped. We had not really expected it to stop working since it didn’t freeze up on Monday night. We assumed our pipes might be frozen even though Tuesday night was not nearly as cold as Monday night. Fortunately my husband had had the foresight to fill our bathtub Monday evening, but we didn’t think to fill the other two tubs in the house. But it started raining, so we hauled as many buckets/tubs as we could outside to catch rainwater we could use for flushing toilets, watering chickens & washing dishes. I called our water supply company, and they told me their towers were empty & their wells could not keep up with the demand of everyone keeping the water running to prevent it from freezing.

While the rain was a blessing, it was also a curse. The temps were still below freezing, so as the rain fell on the trees it froze to the limbs & those limbs began to snap – especially the pine tree limbs. It was eery listening to all the limbs fall around the property. I trudged out to check on the chickens around 10 & discovered that the big pine tree in their yard had dropped a couple of large limbs down on our smaller coops – including the one where my broody mama is. Thankfully the roof was still sound & she was snug as a bug.

As I was coming back in a huge limb from the big pine behind the hair salon came crashing to the ground. In the front yard a large limb fell out of a tree & almost hit my mother in law’s car. We moved it back to safety shortly thereafter. There were so many broken pine tree limbs it smelled like pinesol.

As I was coming back in our electricity went out. We heard later that a limb had fallen on the lines down the street. In the almost 20 years my mil has lived in her house her power has never been out for more than a few hours, but as the minutes turned to hours & the sun dropped in the sky, it looked like we might be joining the ranks of our fellow Texans and spending the night without power. We hauled the generator up to the house to keep the food in the fridge & freezer cold. We also plugged the microwave in so we could heat up the soup I’d made Sunday. We could have put it on the gas grill, but none of us wanted to deal with heating the soup up outside in the freezing temps & rain.

We had been keeping a small fire in the living room fireplace, but after the power went out we built it up & hauled more firewood up to the house in preparation for a night heated only by the fire. We hauled the generator up to the house to keep power. We draped blankets over the doorways in the living room to keep the heat in that room, and when you stepped beyond them there was a noticeable difference in the temperature.

I was worried about my seedlings out in the office with no heat & more freezing temps predicted, so we brought my little setup into the house. The fire kept the room around 68, so we were fairly comfortable. We pulled out our flashlights & I pulled out my guitar, and we sang a few hymns & praise & worship songs. All told it was a fairly pleasant evening, but we were all dreading going up to our cold beds.

Around 8 pm we noticed that the houses across the street had their lights on, and in just a few minutes our lights flickered on too. Hallelujah! Still no running water, but we had heat! Everything was so much better.