Two Days Without Electricity

(This is a translation of yesterday's blog entry)

On December 11th, during the night I heard the sound of heavy branches breaking. It seemed like someone was cutting them, but how? It was the middle of the night and raining cats and dogs. It had rained all day, the monotonous sound of raindrops falling on the earth hour after hour, but the good news was that it wasn’t snow or sleet or hail, just water, nothing else. What harm could water do?

When I woke up the next day I couldn’t see my digital clock next to my bed. I turned it toward me, but I could only see darkness. Ah, I thought, the power went out. Ted was already up and when he came back to the bedroom I told him to get back in bed, without power, what can you do? We didn’t go back to sleep though; we stayed like that talking a little, waiting.

If it were simply a matter of living without electricity, that would not be so hard, but we didn’t have heat, nor enough water to shower or brush our teeth even because we have a well and it only works with electricity. What else?

No stove, (electric stove), no microwave oven, no computer, no radio, no tv, (the tv I didn’t care about since I never watch it), no blender to make our liquid protein breakfast we are used to having in the mornings.

Finally we got tired of being in bed so we got up, Ted to shave in the dark with his battery operated electric shaver and me to look for warm clothes in the closet. Our breakfast? We ate bananas with peanut butter.

I began to think: How many people in the world live without power and have water several miles from their house (or hut)? How spoiled we are. We take everything for granted. Oh, and besides, I had no telephone because I had changed my service to cable telephone in order to save money but fortunately Ted had phone service and I did have my cell phone.

The garage doors normally function with the remote control, but not today. We had to raise them by hand and they didn’t want to stay up so I had to stand on a bench and hold the door so Ted could get his car out. He then did the same for me and I left my car out in the pouring rain. It was still raining, a cold relentless drizzle. The temperature was at 32 and there was ice on all the branches of the trees. Now and then the branches broke with the weight of the ice and made that “craack” sound before falling to the ground.

Ted went to work and soon called me on the phone to tell me that it was harrowing driving down Liberty Square Road, (a road we must travel on to get out of the neighborhood) because there were wires thrown down all over the street and huge trees fallen on both sides of the road and some lying across the power lines stretching them to their limit. We were not going to get power back for quite some time.

I decided to go look for a restaurant in another town where there was power and I found Babico’s Café, a place we eat sometimes. When I got there it was packed with people, (many surrounding towns were without power), but I was lucky and found a seat at the counter on a round spinning stool, the kind they have at Sanborn’s in Mexico.

Later on, since the stream now looked like a river overflowing its banks we realized we could fill buckets with the stream water to use to flush the toilets in the house. The stream was racing furiously and it was easy to fill the buckets but carrying them back up to the house was another story or maybe we’re just not young anymore. I felt my butt muscles working really hard and I arrived at the house exhausted. I couldn’t help thinking about the people who carry buckets of water for miles every day. How easy is my life, how blessed I am.

We went to the movies in the evening more in order to warm ourselves than to watch the movie, but the movie was good and then we had dinner in a nearby restaurant. We went back home to our cold house and slept under two blankets that night. The next day we still had no power and the house temperature had dropped down to 42F. We went out for breakfast and then returned home to pack up because we decided to go to my daughter’s house in Boston about an hour’s drive for us.

How wonderful to have heat and be able to take a shower. We helped my daughter do some painting in one of her rooms and we had dinner at Sol Azteca when Ted told me to call my home phone just to see what would happen with no power. I did and heard my answering machine turn on and my voice come on. We couldn’t believe it, so we called the cable company and the electric company and both assured us that the power was back. We gathered up all our stuff that we had brought so we could stay the night including the cat and returned home. Every light in the house was on. Quickly everything returned to normal and I give thanks for light and heat and all the richness that we have.


Soy Lorena.
12/16/08