"Are you poor?"

While winding up the day in my last art class of the day, a group of teenage girls started peppering me with a series of questions. Somehow they found out that Jed and I don't have a television in our home.

From previous conversations I had explained how my husband and I lived in a loft apartment above a barn. We can sometimes hear the ever-fattening pigs snore at night, and in the middle of the day or feel the goats ramming their heads into the wall of the barn, sending tremors up to our level. As I've mentioned before, we also hear (and sometimes have become deaf to) the sound of roosters--at all hours of the day and night.

Anyhow, my students started wondering what else we went without in our apartment, and the questions began. "Mrs. Stephensen, do you have a microwave?" I told them know, and one girl offered to give me one because her family had just gotten a brand-new one and the old one was just sitting on the counter, unused but fully functional. "Internet?" No. "Central-heating?" No, we use a fireplace. "What kind of bathtub do you have? I can just imagine...one of those old-fashioned ones with the claw feet." No. And we have a toilet, with running water too. "A dishwasher?" No. We wash our dishes by hand.

As the questions came to an end, one girl asked, "Are you guys poor? I can't stand the thought of one of my teachers being poor" They were worried about why we went without all of these modern conveniences. Since I wasn't poor (which really is a relative question), they wanted to know if I lived the way I do because of my religion. Which isn't the case either; I most definitely grew up with all of those things and will probably have some, if not most, of those luxuries that they listed off. She was satisfied with the truthful response that for now, it was a lifestyle choice.

However, within the last week or so, and truthfully, as the temperature started dropping back in November/December, I started questioning this whole fireplace and no central heating plan. Jed and I thought it would be a fun adventure to heat our home with firewood cut by Jed, himself. And it would be a way that we could lower the cost-of-living as we are working towards being financially able to take on the whole farming endeavor.

I don't think the temperature in our bedroom has gotten above 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the last two weeks. It hovers somewhere between 40 and 45 degrees. We've been dripping water from our sink when we think the temperature will drop below freezing because the pipes coming into our apartment pass from the ground, through the air in an unheated barn, to our apartment. We've had a couple of days where no water would come into our apartment and we had to bring water over from Jed's parents' house. We didn't want to deal with that again, so...constant water-dripping.

Jed and his brother, Hans lumberjacking together.

Little did we know that a four-inch pipe draining everything from the apartment would slowly freeze solid drip-by-drip. Yesterday morning, I flushed the toilet only to have it almost overflow as the water had no where to go with solid ice blocking the route out. The sink and tub also had water standing in them with nowhere to go. We don't know how soon a solid frozen four-inch pipe takes to unthaw. But hopefully the next day or two, with temperatures outside  rising to 35 degrees Fahrenheit will be enough. If not, I will continue to shower at my in-laws and threaten Jed with getting me a honey bucket.