Monday, August 27, 2007

Re-Powered

It's become the cliche of my life -- oh, how we take for granted those things that we have until we don't have them anymore. Health, home, convenient access to anything, electricity. We lost our power Thursday afternoon. Sunday afternoon it reappeared. Three whole days without the ability to turn on lights, cook, check email at home, look anything up online, do laundry, dry my hair, watch TV. So quiet without that background hum. So dark at night without even the streetlight lit outside.

I've never wanted to cook or do laundry so badly in my life. Clearly part of my brain lost power, too.
However, no water entered our basement -- lest I have no tales to tell of an entire baseball card collection lost, having to rip up the second carpet in less than a year, or filling the curb with bags and bags of soggy things. It was not uncommon to hear stories swapped of this nature -- 3 inches, 10 inches, 3 feet of water.... evidently a litter box floats at that level.
And, we had water during the whole ordeal -- and due to an older water heater, our showers were warm -- hot, even.
I've truly never been so happy to see lights on in the living room as I was last night upon returning from dinner with friends. The trucks had been outside when we left and I said a sincere, "thank you" to the nice worker man before he climbed up the pole at the end of our driveway.

He looked me in the eye and said, "Don't thank me yet. Just because I'm here doesn't mean your lights are coming on." Talk about a deflating moment, but my thank you stood. There were nearly half a million people without power after Thursday. We were among the faithful remnant of 40-thousand or so folks still without it on Sunday morning. That's a lot of work that those workers did in not always pleasant conditions.

So, today we do laundry, empty our refrigerator and freezer of nearly all their contents, retrieve our salvaged frozen items from a friend's deep freeze, and start again taking for granted things like checking email from home, using our cordless phone, and being lulled through our day with that quiet hum that means things are running.

2 comments:

kwpershey said...

Oh, I'd have gone crazy! I'm glad your power is back, and hope that the quiet time gave some space for happy family moments.

LoieJ said...

One gets to realizing just what one takes for granted these days. The longest ours has ever been out is about one day.

We were without sewer and running water for 3.5 months this winter and spring. People felt sorry for us, but once we had our systems to cope figured out, we were fine. There are more ways to cope with that than with no electricity.