What a clean shirt is worth

The last tablet went at 7:20 this morning. I tipped the bottle into my palm first, the way you check a jar for the last olive, and there was one, small and white with 10 stamped on the side. She took it with 40 mL out of the jug, set the empty bottle down on the table, and left it there.

Nine hundred millilitres each

The bathroom is 5 °C, so we washed in the one room we heat, at 12 °C, door shut, at 10:30 when the sun comes round to the south window. The method was a cup, a basin and a bar of soap. 900 mL each, warmed to about 38 °C outdoors on the butane stove and carried in with the lid on the pot. Warming the day's wash water, close to 4 L, took eleven minutes of flame and about 25 g of gas.

Order matters more than volume. Face and neck first with the clean cloth, then underarms, then chest, then legs, feet last, because by then the water is grey and the feet have stopped caring. Pour, don't dunk. A cup over a cloth gets a person clean on a third of the water a tub takes. 600 mL to wash and 300 to rinse.

My partner did her hair in a second lot, 1.2 L, bent over the basin with a towel round her shoulders, then said nine words about where the basin should go and nothing else all day. She has been running at about forty words a day since Day 3. Hair took nine of them.

The dog licked the empty basin. I let him. He is on 1 L a day like the rest of us, the soap was plain, and I decided that was fine, and I am not certain it was.

The laundry I should not have started

At 11:00 I took 1.5 L out of the drinking jug and washed one shirt and two pairs of wool socks, and hung them in the cold room at 5 °C. By four the shirt was stiff enough to stand against the wall and the socks had frozen into the shape of feet that were not in them.

That is the mistake, and it was the order and not the shirt. We started the day at 6 L. I put a litre and a half of drinking water into laundry at eleven, which left 4.5 L, a number I have not seen since Day 7, and then I had to melt snow in a hurry with the light going.

I did not repeat the Day 11 error of boiling wash water. Washing does not need it. Drinking does. The melt for the basin is never boiled, and it lives in the pot with the dent, so the two never get mixed up.

Washing a 5 kg load by hand is about 20 L, two and a half days of drinking for the two of us. The laundry is abandoned until further notice, and that is now written on the water card. What we did instead: the duvet and both pillows over the back fence for three hours at −6 °C, brought in at 3:00, smelling of nothing. Frozen bedding does not get clean. It gets less bad, and less bad is what is on offer.

The house has a smell now and it is not one smell. The bucket by the back door with its lid on, emptied every morning, which still announces itself in the front hall. The dog, 30 kg, no bath since October. Wet wool in the cold room. And the lentil pot from Day 15 that I thought I had scrubbed.

What the daylight was worth

I could not measure morale, so I counted what got done after lunch. On Day 16 I did nothing for four hours with my hand up on a cushion. Today I carried four loads of snow, melted two pots, split kindling for an hour and wrote two pages.

Four things did that, and three of them were nearly free.

• The sun reached the south window at 10:40 and left at 2:10, three and a half hours. I moved the table into the patch and we ate there with our coats open.
• A hot drink each: 600 mL between the two cups, one tea bag used twice, 6 g of gas. The first hot drink since Day 15. She held hers with both hands for a full minute before she drank any.
• A shave, 800 mL, a disposable razor on its fourth use, no mirror, at the window at 1:00. Seventeen days of beard came off in six minutes and my face in the glass looked like a man I used to work with.
• The clean shirt. It cost 1.5 L of water we did not have, and it was worth more than the water.

The joke did not work. I said that between the shave and the shirt I had gone through the household's entire supply of dignity, and she said, "You used the drinking water," and went back to the sink. She was right, it was not funny, and I laughed anyway, on my own, at the table, which I would rather not have done in front of her.

At the sink, washing my hands before we ate, I counted to twenty. My mother taught me that, twenty seconds, and I have not thought about her doing it in thirty years. It is the only thing in this house that has run on schedule for seventeen days.

The bottle is empty

The pharmacy with the generator is in the grocery store in the next town, 12 km east, 24 km there and back over two hills. The car has 9 L and is furniture. On foot, at 4 km/h on ice, that is six hours of walking, and there are seven hours of usable light.

We put it on the table at 5:00 with the water card between us.

• Walk it tomorrow, one of us. Leave at 7:40 with the bottle, the index card and the health card number, back before dark or not back.
• Ask the woman two doors down for a leftover of the same tablet. She has a cuff, a thermometer and a kit that would stock a clinic, and she is diabetic, and none of that is this tablet.
• Ask the neighbour across the street, who has a truck, a generator, and nothing to say to me since Day 13.
• Wait.

She said she would go. I said no. She said it again, flatter, and I understood she had already decided and was telling me, and the no had been mine to lose in about four seconds. So it is me at 7:40, and the route is written on the back of the water card in pencil, and neither of us said what happens if the store has no power, or no stock, or a queue to the door.

The bottle weighs 14 g empty. It is in my inside coat pocket with the card, and I have checked it twice since supper, which is not a thing I need to do twice.

Water at the end of the day: 8 L. Two melts, 72 L of loose snow for 10.6 L and 36 L for 5.3 L, 252 g of gas. We used 8.6 L the way we always do and 5.3 L on being clean, and the 1.5 L in the shirt is inside that 5.3 and was the worst-spent water of the week.

What I should have had on day zero

• Two 4 L collapsible containers with taps, so a litre for washing is a decision and not a jug with a shirt in it.
• One washcloth per person, different colours, so the face cloth is never the foot cloth.
• A 10 L bucket with a lid and a mark at 2 L, for laundry only, never the same bucket as the toilet.
• A second razor, and a small mirror that does not need the bathroom light.
• 200 g of soap per person per month. We are down to 40 g between us.