Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [9]
Mrs. Miller was the first to open her mouth. “We came over to finish cleaning the house,” she said rapidly. “But now that you’re here I guess you can do it yourself.” With that she gave a little chortle. The Pennsylvania Dutch woman clipped her English and sputtered her sentences like the man at the Greyhound stop.
“Ohhh, it looks fine.”
Mr. Miller was peering at me warmly. “Have a nice trip?” he inquired. He talked slower than his wife and seemed genuinely interested in our answer.
“Hit a little rain coming in.”
“Yeah, it was raining here too.”
Though small and lithe, he bore himself with a certain gravity. After hearing a few more of his carefully chosen words, I no longer thought of him as elfin. The talk was small, but each word had weight; there seemed to be a profundity of interest concentrated in his steady gaze, a wealth of deliberation in his slow speech.
Smiles now and then seemed about to form in the corners of their mouths, and then the lips smoothed out again. I supposed since we were strangers—and Catholics no less—they could not show approval too openly. Or was there something else? Did they see humor in the situation? Did they know something we didn’t? Merely everything, of course. That was why we were here.
Before long, the Millers turned to leave. But as he stepped aboard the buggy (which they had pulled up quietly to a backyard bush while we had toured the house), Mr. Miller turned back and admonished me: “You’ll be expected to mow the lawn.”
The command fell like a brick. My stomach did a somersault. Had the arduous physical regimen already begun? I sighed and chuckled to myself. Too little to go on yet, of course. Perhaps I needed to wait at least to see what sort of lawn mower I would be using.
I remembered that I had not yet given Mr. Miller the rent check, and strode over to him with it—$150 for the first month. I handed him $50 more for starting the garden. He tried to decline it, but after an awkward moment’s insistence, he took the money. I hoped I hadn’t insulted him. The buggy spun about and they were gone.
We had no formal relationship with the Millers except as tenants. Still, we clung to the hope that living next door would provide informal occasions to learn from them, to put us into the thick of their customs and habits. From my brief communication so far, I knew only the scantest about what those customs were: no electricity, no telephones, no motors, no motor vehicles. We of course expected to abide at least by the same restrictions. It was time to take a technological inventory:
The recently purchased house was still equipped with electricity because Mr. Miller had intended to rent to outsiders. But he hadn’t counted on us. We would have the current switched off. As we went through our belongings, we uncovered two kerosene lamps—gifts from our wedding.
Since the water supply depended on electricity, we also needed a substitute for the kitchen faucet. Outside the house, an old pitcher pump sat on a square wooden stand above a cistern, which received the water like a sink. Mary was soon cranking the handle and testing the device’s capabilities.
The cistern was good for dish-washing and bathing water. For drinking water we looked to the spring that lay back over the hill. The Millers offered to bring us a container of spring water every two days when they went to fetch their own.
In all of these adaptations, we were conforming to the consequences of turning off the electricity. This also meant there would be no electric stove, much less a microwave oven. Mrs. Miller had hinted that she had a kerosene range to spare, which we could place on the screened back porch for good ventilation.
I lifted my bicycle from the hatchback of the Escort. We hoped to buy another one in the nearest town, so we could travel together. We didn’t