The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart Read Free Book Online

water heater meant we could still have hot showers.
    “It’ll be like camping, guys!” I enthused.
    “We hate camping,” Sussy pointed out. “ You hate camping, Mum.”
    Details, details! “I hate bugs and dirt and sleeping bags,” I corrected. “This is camping the way it ought to be: with our own beds, pillows, stemware, and dual-flush toilets.”
    Thoreau himself helped me figure out the timing. He’d begun his life in the woods at Walden Pond on Independence Day, July 4, 1844. For us in the southern hemisphere—where Thoreau the naturalist would have been enchanted to discover the trees shed their bark but keep their leaves—that equated to January 4. Equally important, it would allow exactly twelve hours upon our return from Gracetown to machine-wash the station wagon full of holiday laundry we’d carted home with us. (Lord knows, doing it by hand would have been like vacuuming the house with an ear syringe.) Fittingly, from the children’s point of view, our experiment would end on Independence Day.
    “But what about the phone?” the kids had asked, panicked. I explained we’d simply go back to using old-fashioned cord phones, but they were still suspicious. “How will they stay charged?” they fretted.
    “You can’t be serious,” I replied.
    The truth is, I had no idea. Seriously, why doesn’t a basic phone need electricity? It’s kind of magical, once you stop to think about it. And actually I had stopped to think about it not that long ago.
    It was on a day maybe six months earlier, when The Experiment was just an evil gleam in Mummy’s gimlet eye. I was working from home, and I heard the sound of many phones ringing. Nothing unusual there. Our cordless collection at that point numbered five handsets, each programmed by Sussy with its own very special, faintly satanic ringtone (a techno-inspired remix of “Home Sweet Home” being the most chilling). Visitors occasionally cried out in terror when our phones rang. For me, the scary part was finding the damn things.
    The children rarely bothered returning the phones to their recharging stations. To be honest, it wasn’t my forte either. Most of the time, we’d simply drop them where they’d last been used, like gum wrappers or gym socks. Usually you could follow a ringtone to its source—tangled up in the bedclothes, or peeking out coyly from a drawer, or squashed under the sofa cushions like a raisin. But all this took time and energy and the kind of playful ingenuity I rarely had anymore, unless a pitcher of margaritas was involved. Even worse was the problem of the MIAs: phones that had wandered away from base and been left to die in some foxhole. Every once in a while they would all go missing, and I’d find myself on a grim telephonic scavenger hunt, seeking wounded handsets too weak to respond to signal.
    On this particular day, I was expecting an important work call, and ... well, let’s put it this way. If a phone rings in the forest, and there’s nobody there who can find it, does it still make a sound?
    The next day I went out and bought a couple of old-fashioned plug-in phones for my bedroom and home office. The color of prosthetic limbs, they featured oversized buttons and pretty much nothing else, and were clearly meant for the demented and the infirm. So be it. At this point, I qualified easily on both counts. The kids ROFLed uproariously at the sight, but I knew I would have the last LOL. Next time the phone rang, instead of having to smoke it out with a gasoline torch, a psychic, and a Geiger counter, I could just pick it up and answer it. “Honestly!” I crowed. “What will they think of next?”
    So we were good for phones. Illumination would be a snap too, once we’d stocked up on candles, kerosene, flashlights, and battery-operated lanterns. It would be like mood lighting. At the very least, it would cast a romantic glow on the buildup of unvacuumed pet hair. Food and drink might be a bit trickier, but I figured