Twenty-Five Hours, and a Bonus Later!

We've had a bit of a windstorm here, with trees down and power lost. News reports indicate that thousands of people in and around the city lost power for some varying amount of time.

Here in paradise, we were without power for more than 25 hours--from 2:45 on Monday afternoon to 4:30 yesterday. In the country, as in the city, electricty provides for functions such as heating and refrigeration/freezing of food. But out here, when the electricity goes out, the water pump and heater also go out. That means no flushing, no washing of hands, no warm water, no showers.

I spent much of the time huddled in a chair--reading something without necessarily paying attention, eating cheap cookies, and wondering when oh when the power was coming back. When it got dark, we sat in candlelight and envied people across the bay who seemed to have power.

OK, I did that envying part. My husband took the whole event pretty much in stride. In the daylight, he got the chainsaw out to clear our driveway of the huge spruce tree down across the end. To do that, he had to mess with various chainsaws and eventually build one of parts. Last night he fixed all the problems and we now have either four operative chainsaws, only one of which is wonky to start. During dark hours, he tried to engage me in chat. Good man.

His aplomb makes me wonder now why it was so hard for me to just go with the flow. Oh, sure--the sound of the wind is eerie. Plus it's worrisome, to say the least, to see very very tall trees all around you bending 45 degrees in one direction and 45 degrees in the other. It's almost worse at night when you can't see it but still know it's happening.

Normally I'm pretty calm and reliable in an emergency/crisis/difficulty. I can figure out what's important and focus on that. I let the back of my mind work on other eventualities but don't lose track of the here and now.

But in this case, I dithered and crumbled. Part of my problem was that I had no idea what time period I was working with. I didn't know what problems needed solutions and what could just go by the wayside.

For example, coffee. At the house, we have no provision for making coffee without electricity. However, at the camp, we have a couple of ways to do it. When I got up yesterday morning, I wondered whether I should walk down to the camp (10 minutes), make coffee there, and bring it back--our equivalent of a run to a coffee shop for a to-go mug. As it happens (we discovered later), nine large trees block the path between here and there, so that solution wouldn't have been quite so easy. However, I abandoned that idea early on because SURELY THE POWER WOULD COME ON SOON.

We also have a generator. We plugged the basement freezer into it for a time, in the hope that that much power would keep its contents from spoiling. I'm not sure it did, but it helped. But anyway, by the time we had that freezer set up, I had moved past finding a solution to having morning coffee, and it didn't occur to me to plug in the coffeemaker. All of which made rest of the day less pleasant than it might have been. Even though we were making plans in case the power didn't come on soon, SURELY IT WOULD.

I didn't even have to be cut off from the world. I own two battery-powered computing devices and our phone line worked, so theoretically I could get online. But I didn't, and I didn't see the point in trying, because SURELY THE POWER WOULD COME ON SOON. We don't have a battery-powered radio, though of course we could sit in the car to hear news reports if we needed to, but I didn't really think I needed to because (all together now) SURELY THE POWER...well.

I like to think that if someone had said to me, "You'll be without power for 25 hours," I'd have been able to cope better. But I'm not sure that that's true, given my bonus lesson.

After we got our power back, I used electricity like a woman possessed. I flushed toilets. I dried clothes. I turned lights on and off in rooms as I needed to: flick, the magic of light! of dark! light! dark! I washed dishes and myself. And yes, I made coffee. And then supper. Ahh, normal life.

And then, as we were drinking coffee and watching the sunset stain the sky and lake pink, the power went out again.

I wish I could say I cheerily lit candles and we counted our blessings, grateful for the gift of the few hours of power that would surely give us the fortitude to soldier on through the dark evening.

Instead, I put my head down on the plastic placemat, trying to avoid getting drips of candle wax in my clean hair, and said words I try to avoid saying aloud. Eventually, yes, we re-lit candles. Roy built the fire in the stove; the temperature fell with the night. He took a drive to assess the extent of the outage. I phoned the power company and heard their automated voice predicting that we would have power back by 10 p.m. I crossed my fingers.

I did rally. I returned to dull resignation, a step up from the semi-annoyed semi-comatose cookie-eating state. I wasn't being a particularly good sport, but I did force myself to be vocally grateful for the fact that I was clean, warm, fed, and dry.

The power came back on much sooner than predicted--this outage lasted only an hour. Even I am not egotistical enough to think that the relatively brief duration was a cosmic reward for my minimal effort to behave like a reasonable adult when faced with a minor difficulty. But I was sure grateful for it.

And I have tried to be grateful today--aloud. Often. And I wrote down the whole "plug the coffemaker into the generator" idea in case I lose my problem-solving ability next time, too.

Because there will be a next time--there's always something. And I'm already grateful that I have the chance to handle it with more grace.