What I will never do again

I started this list at 8:40 this morning on the back of the water card, under the word DETECTOR, and finished it at 4:10 this afternoon. Twelve lines, one for each thing I got wrong badly enough to still be thinking about on Day 27. Nothing on it is new; every line points at a day already written.

Five from the first week

• Day 0 — the phone. I will never let the phone be the light. It was at 34 percent at 6:40 p.m. and dead at 9:20, and the torch in the drawer had four dead cells in it because the good ones went into a toy in September.
• Day 1 — the bathtub. I will never put the drinking water in the bath. Twenty-six litres went in and 8 of them sat under a sheet of plastic in the room where the bucket was going to live.
• Day 2 — the bucket. I will never put the bucket in the bathroom because that is where a toilet goes. No window, an extractor fan that needs power, and by 1 p.m. on the first day the smell had reached the landing. It belongs by the back door with 15 cm of sawdust in it.
• Day 3 — the furnace. I will never say "the gas is still on" as if that settles it. The furnace needs power twice, for ignition and the draft fan and again for the blower, and without the blower it runs about ninety seconds and stops. That is what it did on the first night while I was telling her it would keep working.
• Day 5 — the trip. I will never drive past a shop 600 m from my door to reach one 18 km away. That was 36 km and about 4 L of the last 13, for 8 L of water that had been sitting 600 m from my door at $2.99 a jug.

Five from the second week

• Day 8 — the melt. I will never let the water get to 0.93 of a day before I start melting snow. Day 8 was 8 L against 8.6 L a day, and the melt cost four cartridges and four hours and ten minutes of flame to produce 15 L. That is not a supply. It is an afternoon.
• Day 9 — the tablet. I will never be unable to name my own medication. On Day 9 there were eight left and I had to turn the bottle over to read 10 off the side, and the first aid kit I had been telling myself I owned was eleven items with no gauze and no gloves.
• Day 10 — the window. I will never light a room I have not looked at from the street. Nine nights of a candle in the front glass, and from 38 m away the 4 cm stripe between the curtains fell on the snow and told anyone walking past that this house had stores.
• Day 12 — the tray. I will never carry heat into a room and shut the door behind it. 636 g of briquettes in 21.5 m³ got the back room to 14 °C by 4:20 p.m. and put a headache behind my eyes, and the alarm was 6.5 m away, one floor up, behind a shut door of its own.
• Day 14 — the baseline. I will never run this house a week again without writing the numbers down. Front hall 5 °C, kitchen 6 °C, spare bedroom 3 °C, and nothing from week one to compare any of it to except the word cold, which is not a measurement. The gap under the front door was 5 mm by 900 mm and had been there eleven years.

Two from the third

• Day 16 — the glove. I will never swing an axe with one glove on. The left one was frozen into the shape of a hand on the porch rail behind me and I did not walk back for it, and the cut was 4 cm with an 8 mm gap over the first two knuckles. Nor will I lift a wound to look at it before there is pressure on it; those ninety seconds are why it bled again.
• Day 17 — the bottle. I will never let a daily tablet get down to eight before I do the arithmetic on the walk. Eight days of tablets against 12 km east, and I was counting days when the number that mattered was kilometres.

Four of the twelve cost under $40 to prevent. The cells were in the kitchen clock, the gauze and tape were $34, and the door sweep was $34 and I walked away from it in October.

What I have stopped doing

Writing twelve things down is not being sorry for them, and I want that said before the list gets quoted back at me. The only line that cost me anything to write was Day 16: she had it right, I knew it, and I argued for another minute anyway.

What I have actually stopped doing is praying. I did not decide to. On Day 2 I prayed on the stairs for the woman two doors down, badly, then did it again at ten because the first one had been so poor. Day 7 was mostly swearing. Day 8 I carried snow for an hour and a half and something in me sat down, and I have never been sure that counts. On Day 16 I bargained at ten at night and made a list of what I would give up, and every item on the list was already gone. Since that night, nothing. I noticed on Tuesday, the way you notice a clock has stopped.

I am not going to write that I lost my faith. I did not have enough of it for that to be the right word. I stopped doing a thing that had stopped returning anything, and the truthful version is that I miss the habit more than the answers.

She still says it will turn. She said it on Day 9 and she has said it since, in the same flat voice she uses for the weather, and she has never asked me to agree, or told me where it comes from. I have stopped trying to borrow it. Between us there is a card on a cupboard door with 8.6 on the front and twelve lines on the back, and a woman who counts her pens and says it will turn. I do not know which of those is doing the work.

She has run at forty words a day for twenty-seven days and most of them have been about the water number. On Day 14 she rolled a towel against the front door with her foot while I was still writing the gap down. That is the other habit I have dropped, telling her what I am about to do when she has usually already done it.

The dog has no line on this list. He drank his litre every day, including the days we did not, and he slept against the front door for four nights before I worked out he was lying on the cold.

Water was 20 L at dawn and 18 L tonight: 8.6 L out at the card number, 6.6 L back in from 45 L of loose snow at 106 g of gas. The melt was the wrong call. The creek is 400 m east and one trip with the bucket covers two days; I stayed in because it was −6 °C and the list was on the table. That is the thirteenth line, and it is not on the card with the others, because the others are finished.

What I should have had on day zero

• A torch on the kitchen wall with cells that live in it, and a second one by the back door.
• 20 L in four lidded jugs, not 26 L in a bath.
• The number on the fridge on Day 0, and the same number written again on Day 7, so there is a week-one figure to compare against.
• $34 of gauze, tape and gloves, and a $34 door sweep. Both were priced, both were declined, both were in a shop in October.
• The medication card in a coat pocket from the first night, not from Day 9.