Ruth
Two days before Christmas, a chill awoke me in the morning. I got up and looked at the thermometer—the temperature inside the house was forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, and it was minus eighteen degrees outside.
Didn’t we set the heating to 68 degrees? Why did the inside temperature drop so low?
Ken called the gas company and the furnace repair guy. They came to inspect and found that because the weather was so cold, solid ice blocked the outlet on the roof, and the furnace automatically shut down due to its safety feature. There wasn’t much they could do until the weather warmed up. What should we do when the temperature at home continued to drop? In the end, we took out all the small portable space heaters and also put on our heavy winter coats. Even so, I was still shivering from the cold.
Some thoughts flashed across my mind.
How did people in the American Midwest survive a hundred years ago without electricity?
What does a person need to survive? Food and water. In places where the weather is cold, there must be shelter and clothing. Besides those, what else?
Nowadays, why does everyone’s life become so complicated? Sanitation, education, healthcare, careers, retirement, all kinds of electronic gadgets and high-tech devices… The list keeps growing.
I thought of one of my favorite short stories by Tolstoy, “How Much Land Does a Man Require?” A farmer received an offer he couldn’t resist. For a fixed sum of money, he could walk around as large an area as he wished from daybreak to sunset and mark his route with a spade along the way. All the land he’d walked on and marked would be his. The only condition was that he must return to his starting point by sunset that day. Of course, after setting off, he sprinted and marked out land as fast as he could. As the sun started to set, he raced back to the starting point just in time. Exhausted from the run, he dropped dead, and his servant buried him in an ordinary grave—only six feet long.
I remembered that when I was a child, I lived in Mei-Shan, a rural area in Taiwan. In summer, the temperature could reach more than 30 degrees Celsius. Because of its altitude, the temperature sometimes dropped to zero degrees Celsius in winter. There was no air-conditioning or heating system, and we didn’t even own a small portable heater. I not only survived but also considered that period as one of the happiest times in my life because I was surrounded by my parents and relatives who loved me dearly.
What does a person need to live a happy life? Food, water, clothing, shelter, and love. To live a happy life, maybe love is the most important thing.
