The Collapse XXXIII: Rushing Towards Winter

12 September 20XX

My Dear Lucilius:

A bit more of a delay between communications. My apologies: our power has been a bit more irregular and there has been a great deal to do in a short period of time.

Our weather here has taken a definitive turn for the cooler here – we got down to 39 F at least once. So I have been busy. The quail have been moved into the greenhouse for their Winter Quarters, although I have not sealed up the greenhouse completely yet – still a little too warm yet during the day – and I have started to lay out the planters for Autumn (although I have not figured out the water just yet). I have taken the liberty of inserting the hive entrance reducers into the hive entrances, not completely blocking it to a single hole but reducing the entrance.

I am sowing the overwinter crops now – winter wheat, winter rye, winter barley, garlic, leeks, greens. I have always done this by hand, so it is not an unusual task with hoe, shovel, rake, and caster – although it has seemed that I have paid a bit more attention to it than usual this year. I will be honest that I believe it is one of my favorite days of the year – and indeed, it consumes an entire day by the time I am completed.

I am still pulling items from the garden as I am able. At this point I have surrendered the concept of dehydration (as we are effectively bereft of reliable power) and am just eating as much of the fresh produce as I can and feeding the rest to the quail. Somewhere in my notes I have something about using a wood stove as a dehydrator – I am not quite to the point of being able to burn it regularly, but should be there soon (indeed, I have been using a small camping stove outside to boil my water for coffee and oatmeal to put off heating up the house too much.

With winter coming, I have become quite a scrounger of anything burnable (my stove, you remember, will accept smaller branches). I have constructed for myself a pack reminiscent of an old Japanese wood collector: two pegs sticking out at the bottom of a board with rope to put my arms through and another set of ropes to tie off the bundle. On any walk I take now – and I take more and more because soon enough the snow will make it miserable to make any at all – I have my contraption with me, diligent searching for fallen branches or even small downed trees that I can come back later and cut up. Fortunately I live at the north end of “town”; there are very few houses that way and I am often the only person I see all day.

Protein remains my weak point. The loss of the freezer means that I have limited ability to store fish for the long term (my primary form of protein) – unless, of course, I had a smokehouse, one of those 550 items that I intended to build someday but never got to. It will have to move to the top of the list.

For now, I have had to be inventive. Salting fish has become the new smoking this year (fortunately, I had enough of that to last a while). And I have been trying to trade more for meat, although as turns out I probably counted more on the ability to trade honey that I have been actually able to do this year. I may need to try killing a deer myself before the Autumn has fled. I have not done this in a while, so it may come down to as much as luck as anything else.

I have made my annual pass of the cabin and shed, looking for any holes that need caulking or filling. I have also started to look at repair of the outhouse for the upcoming winter. I am already shuddering at the thought of trekking through the January winds.

Excluding protein (and I am working to close that gap as quickly as possible), I believe myself to be as ready as I can be, given the circumstances.

The thought of winter has already become concerning, and it has hardly started yet. I worry for us all.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca