The Collapse XXXIV: On Hope

16 September 20XX

My Dear Lucilius:

I am receipt of your e-mail from 14 September and am grateful for it. I comforted to hear that you are all doing as well as can be expected – although your proximity to your major urban center continues to remain a concern for me. Agreed that with fuel quickly dwindling, the chances are also dwindling that any unrest will creep its way to you – it is a rather long walk for our overweight, industrial era – but it still concerns me. Perhaps living so far from large bodies of people for a period of time does this.

Autumn is advancing here more quickly every day, it seems. Our days are more and more overcast and rain has become a regular reality. I am thankful I managed to get the bulk of items ready when I did; the last little bit: final preparations for the hive, continuing to ready the greenhouse, getting the last gasp out of the summer garden, making sure the autumn and winter garden – have taken up most of my time since I last wrote. But that is all done, now: all there is left to do is the daily maintenance and the preparation for the arrival of winter.

This drop in temperature has meant that the wood stove is coming into use. I am still fortunate that with the insulation, the house is warm with a minimum of wood. It also means that I ready hot water in the house for my tea and oatmeal in the morning. It also means that I am out, even in the drizzle and wet, looking for a little more firewood.

There is no more local traffic. To a large extent, people seem to have retreated into their homes and are (I assume) preparing for the first Winter here without power in perhaps 100 years. A stunning thought to think within the short period of 6 months we have immediately stepped back that far.

The power cycle has continued to dwindle even less; we are down to perhaps 4 hours a day of power, irregularly spaced. My routine is now to leave a single light on and when it comes on, immediately drop what I am doing and use the computer (including typing in this letter, of course). I am thankful that I had taken care of what I needed to before the power went completely out; I can only imagine what life would be like today with the cold outside and a refrigerator of rotting food inside.

Besides cold, the other thing the coming of Winter brings is the dark; earlier and longer. I do have my light sources of course: candles, LED flashlights, a head lamp – but I am trying to conserve them for when the “real” difficult times arise. I am “giving” myself the gift of an hour of headlamp time a night to read and sit with rabbits in front of the fire. I am not sure they enjoy it, but at least they have time out of their cage and I am not confronted with a bedtime of 1930. I can recharge the headlamp for now but must always measure the use of it against how much longer I can charge it.

You had asked me in your letter about hope. I do not know rightly how to answer that question. The view from the Upper Mountain States looks, I am sure, different from an urban area in a temperate climate. I am hopeful that I will be able to survive whatever is coming up; I have tried to prepare as best I could and now there is simply nothing left for me to do to prepare, just to survive.

I remember the last time I visited, that evening we sat in your living room surrounded by your books and CDs and you asked me what my 50’s had taught me. My response, if you recall, was that I was learning to become reconciled to the loss of things: dreams, passions, even (to some extent) health. What I see in my world now is similar to that: it is not that I have lost that hope, it is just that I am learning to become reconciled to the loss of it.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca