Maintenance Future

For the last thirteen years, I have lived in a little house. Even as my family grew, it has remained more than enough space for us all. Below the house is a basement. The majority of it is merely crawlspace, but about a quarter of the house’s footprint is a true, standing-height space. After some years of observation and optimization, we’ve managed to make it a functional, long-term storehouse. Shelves like library stacks line the edges. There are two freezers. On and within them is a year of food and supplies. These are the things our household actually uses up — the ordinary, unglamorous inventory of living here. We rotate it. Things come in and things go out and get replaced. It isn’t a sealed stash waiting for the end of the world; it’s a working pantry with a year of runway. We buy what we depend on when the price is to our advantage rather than when we’ve run out, and a supply chain interruption would only register if it lasted longer than any other in our lives so far. We…