Last week I wrote about a trickle of water through a frozen hose, and how that teaches me lessons about perseverance and keeping going even when times are tough. This week, as we had a sudden “cold snap” over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I’m reminded of resilience. Normally when our highs are in the forties or fifties and the lows somewhere in the 20s or 30s, the hose thaws to the point where we get that trickle. This week, it didn’t.
So yesterday, when it was 50 outside and I was SURE the hose had thawed to fill everyone’s water (don’t worry, they had plenty), I hooked it up and turned on the water. Nothing. Nope. Not even a trickle. Well poo.
Having done this before, I kept the water going and unhooked the hose here by my office cabin. I could tell everything from there on out was clear and warm as it’d been laying in the sun. I shook out some ice. Still no water. Then, methodically, I worked inch by inch, foot by foot, back along the hose that runs between our office cabins and the house (frozen solid), breaking up the ice to where the water could push it out. Still nothing. So I checked the area lying in our back walkway. Yep, the sun had cleared that. Until I got to the one corner by the garden shed — more ice. There’s where our logjam had occurred. So I broke it up, eventually pulling the entire hose into the backyard and into the sunlight.
Eventually a trickle of water emerged. I shut off the hose, walked it back through and hooked it up, then turned it on again. Hooray! Water!
Though it took a bit for the water to push out the ice and normal flow to resume, we once more had the trickle which experience told me would do the job. Resilience. Thinking about new ways of doing things and resolving issues that seem insurmountable. That’s one of the final horse lessons of 2020. Resilience.
