The Collapse CCXIII: A Boxing Day Of Hope

 26 December 20XX+1

My Dear Lucilius:

Even if we have a day of celebration, time and tide wait for no-one.

One of the things that I suspect most people who thought about apocalyptic living but never even dabbled in it is the amount of effort involved in day to day survival.

We (Pompia Paulina and I) are fortunate: we had a stock to start from (although diminishing of course; everyone’s is), had lived in a location where periodic interruptions and inaccessibility was a regular thing, and lived general frugal lives. So the “dip” in that sense is certainly not a severe as others.

None the less, even just getting by is a lot of work.

There is not an “ordinary” day, especially it seems in Winter. As I have written before, life is largely dominated by the source of light that you have – and ours in Winter is short indeed. There are some tasks which are regular – checking on the greenhouse and quail in some fashion, looking to make sure a beehive has not fallen over, shoveling out the path to the outhouse – and some which seem regular but are just as likely periodic: gathering deadfall, pulling water from the pump, trying a hand at fishing (others hunt of course; I have no skill in that matter), being creative about food sources.

And now, more than ever, planning for what to do as soon as the weather starts to turn.

In Winter – at least for me – this total amount of work seems to split into periods of activity and inactivity. I go until I cannot go anymore, oscillate between being too cold and too warm. I cannot say I am starving – far from that – but I suspect if I put myself on the scale, I would find that some amount of weight has melted off.

Another part of my day – not really compensated in the normal sense, of course – is just stopping in on people. Hopefully – and I say this with sincerity – I will have an opportunity to begin to visit with our Erstwhile Neighbors as well; it is my sincerest belief we cannot have such a small community divided and not speaking to each other. The last few weeks have given me hope.

Hope. That is twice I have used that word in a paragraph. It is a rather funny thing, hope. If you were to ask me if I could point to something I am “hopeful” about I would struggle to come up with something long term. We occasionally hear from our friends to the North, East, and West of us, but distance lies between all of them and ourselves. We have yet to hear a peep out of any sort of governmental body to show that such a thing is working or will be back. And given that, except for the occasional invader, we have seen precisely no-one a year or heard from them, there seems to be little enough to generate that hope.

But as Pompeia Paulina reminds me – continually now, it seems – hope exists sometimes in spite of our outer circumstances, not because of them.

And that, my dear Lucilius, gives me hope as well.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca