’Twas a dark and windy night

The following was written by candlelight. Bear with me. These are random thoughts that wandered through my brain while I waited, not so patiently, for the winds to die down and the lights to come on again.

"The wind kicked up, lights went out, trees fell over. It’s still daylight at 5:30 p.m. Don’t open the fridge. No cooking. Dishwasher full of dirty dishes I was going to handle later. Much later, it appears, as it is now 1 a.m. and still no power. Or heat. Conserving water. Leery of flushing.

Candles offer minimal light and the small illusion of heat. Went to bed at 9:30. Woke at 12:15 a.m. Relit candles. Checked status of power from Edison. Needed a damn password! Phooey. Now I’m really cranky. Phone battery at 50%.

At first, it’s a bit of an adventure, but the password need threw me over the edge. Now I’m mad. It’s dark and still very windy. My hair is cold! Thank goodness it’s not a raging blizzard out there. I’m writing by flashlight. The son-in-law says he’ll bring a generator in the morning if we’re still without power. Curious to see the damage outside.

It was the wind. Took down trees that fell on power lines in the dark of the night. The very dark of the night. Oh, how we take our power for granted. Flip a switch – light, heat, water. If terrorists were to attack our power grid … it is a constant fear, but we go our merry way. Some have generators, but what do they run on? What powers them? Maybe we need to look into solar energy after all.

‘They,’ the solar ‘green’ people, have been warning us that we should prepare. Me? I have candles. And a blanket. And a cookie jar full of Oreos. So I sit in the dark in the middle of the night. Looking out my window, I see a western sky full of stars, so there’s that. It could be worse. It could be much worse. So I’ll thank God for my candles, the roof over my head and that it’s not a blizzard or raging stormy rains. Daylight will come.”

And it did. And we were still out of power, for a total of 22 hours. The outages were random. Some just experienced flickering lights; others were still without power two days later. Our poor old pin oak – I call it self-pruning – dropped another load of sticks we have yet to clean up. The yard is too soft to tackle that job right now. We lost one little straggly pine tree that merely fell over, not taking anything with it.

We were no longer in the dark. The house was heating up again. I could finally run the dishwasher and, ahem, flush a toilet. The winds let up. Life returned to a degree of normalcy, as far as that goes in the Foster house.

And then a meteor. Who’da thunk it? Right over our heads, we heard. We, in our own little world, had no clue until we saw it all over the news. It very likely could have dropped pieces in our backyard. We didn’t notice anything unusual out there. No hunks of outer space debris in the driveway. But we still have storm debris, so who knows?

What’s next? We’d best not ask.