Yesterday the power went out. All the appliance and computer humming and buzzing that goes on sub-consciously, always in the background, went un-naturally silent. The ceiling fan went still. The fireplace blower stopped. The only sounds were the wind howling around the house, rain smacking against the windows, the tick, tick, tick of the battery operated clock.
The power stopped while I was typing on my computer in the early afternoon. Flicker. Flicker. Out.
It stayed out for nearly eight hours.
We lit candles. Played Uno by the fireplace. Twice my son asked "Can I watch some TV?"
"Sure, why not?" My sadistic streak chimed in.
He jumped up and ran to the other room, stopping mid way. He turned slowly with indignant eyes locked on me.
I enjoy these minor inconveniences.
Not enough to significantly elevate the danger. But enough to be reminded we're here at the pleasure of nature. Without electricity, our homes become little more than huts or man made caves with many useless phantom appendages.
I know the electricity will come back eventually. So I can enjoy its absence.
My mother used to visit her grandfather's farm in south central Michigan when she was a little girl; The family farm, whose house was connected to nothing but the earth. No gas. No sewer. No electricity. Every Thanksgiving she'd run down the dirt driveway and burst into the front door where he'd be seated in a rocking chair by the hot wood stove reading a book, or listening to a small radio. On the stove, boiling water. They'd all go out to the fields together to pick potatoes and onions and yams. Apples from the apple tree. All prepared and cooked over a wood stove and the nights lit with kerosene and paraffin. My grandmother lived on that farm with her father in law for four years while her husband was at war. And one day the old man came in from the fields, sat down at his rocking chair and said to his daughter in law, "there's a soldier coming down the road."
My great grandmother lived most of her childhood lit by fire, and my father recalled to me his first experience with a television. My brother and I awoke one morning to a strange new box in our house "What is it?" I wondered "It's a computer!" Exclaimed my brother. It was a Beta video player. The computer was to come a bit later. A Vic 20. The timeline of the computer to my son will be to him like the timeline of the television between my father and me. The timeline of the television to him, will be like the timeline of the airplane to me. My Abbot and Costello will be his Steve Martin.
The longest I'd ever gone without electricity in a dwelling was in Iowa City, Iowa. Back at our boarding house my girlfriend and soon to be wife banged urgently on the door of the shared bathroom as I took a shower, just as the lights went out. "We have to get underground!" She yelled. I threw on a robe and we ran outside to get to the basement and the sky was a deep green and trees bent un-naturally and spraying dirt and sand stung my face. After the tornado moved past a train hung off the rails into the river and trees and power lines littered the streets. Ice cream shops gave away melting ice cream to any who wandered past surveying the damage. Without power for ten days, the residents of our boarding house held a bon fire every night in the driveway.