When the Power Goes Off

When the electric lines are coated with snow like this, it's a given that the electricity is going to go out. Which it did Saturday. Even more surprising, it came on after only a twelve hour outage.

What do you do when the electricity is off? We found plenty to keep us busy:

Lit the candles and the kerosene lamps, of course.

Larry cleaned and filled the eight or so kerosene lamps we keep in good working order.

I caught up on a bit of sewing. Every pair of pants and every jacket I buy has to be hemmed it seems, so Saturday was a good time to catch up on a few of them, plus mend the lace tablecloth I'd been meaning to get to.

Cooking is both simpler and more difficult. The woodstove in the living room does double or triple duty when the power is off--provides its usual comforting heat, plus cooks dinner, makes coffee, dries clothes and in this case melts snow to use to flush the toilet. We had ten gallons ready for other uses--cleaning, washing, etc. but used the snow for the toilet.

Larry cleaned widows on the inside and will get to the outside when the weather is better.





The little blue radio on the table kept us supplied with music and weather updates as we worked, and the candles and lamps gave a warm glow after dark.

Votives in the bedroom, placed in front of the mirror, gave double the light and were bright enough for us to see to get ready for bed.

In my office, I worked by lamp and candlelight to organize paperwork, finally catching up on a months-long backlog. I'm still not done but I made a good dent in the pile waiting to be sorted and filled a couple trash cans in the bargain. I am still amazed at how paper can literally swallow an open space in no time at all. Paperless society? When?

When all our work was done, We ate dinner in the log room by the fireplace and Larry got out his little battery powered DVD player so we could watch an old Christmas movie. We went to bed earlier than usual and had just drifted off when lights, radio, and all the other appliances buzzed back into life.

That's how we spent our day. The first day without electricity is usually fun; the second means a little more work--the food in the fridge would have needed to be packed into a cooler or two and put out on the porch to stay cold; we'd have had to melt a lot more snow, and dishes would begin to be more of a chore as we would have had to heat water on the stove to wash them. Hygiene becomes more work too. Three days means laundry might be piling up, more and more snow would need to be melted and cleaning becomes a lot more time-consuming. Heating bath water is a big job. Four days or more and it's serious hunker down and get the basics done and maybe a trip to someone's house to do some laundry and take a real shower. Unless of course, you still can't get out...then it's more grunt work.

We were very lucky this time. Many people are still without power and I feel for them. With the holidays looming, many people will be looking at a slightly different Christmas morning than what they had planned. I hope it will still be merry and bright, and filled with love and laughter, even if everything is not quite as perfect as they might want it to be.