About the middle of the week, I became aware of the forecast of an impending snow and ice event for my area of Middle Tennessee. Such forecasts come along a couple of times every winter and more often than not, they don’t happen or turn into minor events. But this one seemed a little more certain than most and people began stockpiling bread, milk and toilet paper. I’ve never quite understood this obsession with toilet paper – I’ve been snowbound a few times in my life and never used all that much toilet paper. I don’t drink milk, so that doesn’t enter into my plans, and I don’t really use that much bread either. I did stock up on Dr. Pepper and snacks and at the last minute decided to buy some sandwich makings in case the electricity went off and I couldn’t cook. I made a pot of potato soup and a cake. Turns out, the potato soup was pretty useless, but I’ve eaten over half the cake.
I bought extra dog food and a new stock tank heater for my horses’ water trough, and I made sure we filled up the water, unhooked the hoses and put some buckets over the hydrants to keep the ice off the handles. That was about the extent of my storm prep.
I woke up Saturday morning to snowfall and an already white landscape. The dogs loved it – Scout especially is happiest outside when it’s in the 30’s. He never gets the memo about bringing your pets inside when it’s cold. Saturday was uneventful, although we did call off church for the next day. That was okay and I had soup and cake to eat for lunch. Or so I thought.
When I woke up Sunday morning, it was to the peculiar silence that means the power is off broken only by the hiss of sleet hitting the roof. When I stumbled to the door, the trees were coated in ice. I am only three miles from the center of town, but due to an oddity in how the electric lines run to our road, when the power goes off, sometimes it stays off for quite a while. The predicted temperatures for Sunday and Monday nights were in single digits. Serious stuff. I have a fireplace with gas logs so I knew I wouldn’t freeze, but I was worried a little about the horses and the water. I got down the kerosene lamp from the mantle, glad that it was almost full of oil and had a wick. I retrieved blankets and a quilt from my bedroom, closed off the living room from the rest of the house, settled in with a book, and ate more cake.
That night, I sat in front of the fire, wondering just how long the power would be out. The fire was burning steadily, doing its best to keep the room bearable. I thought about fire and what a miracle it is. Besides air, water and food, I suppose it is the most important thing for life over the centuries. I have been reading Hal Borland lately and I thought about an essay he wrote on trees and how the trees store up heat from the sun and how that warmth lives again with the burning of its branches in the winter. No wonder people over the centuries have gathered around a fire, its warmth welcoming friends and making friends of strangers. My fireplace is usually a comfortable extra, adding to the coziness of the big living room, but in this situation, it became an essential.
For the next three nights, I slept on the couch in front of that fire, under two blankets, two fuzzy throws, a quilt and my winter coat, dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, a fuzzy robe and socks. Trips to the bathroom were like treks to the Arctic with only a flashlight to guide me. It occurred to me that all those quilts displayed in an old glass front cabinet once warmed members of my family – no wonder that are so many of them, and that same fireplace used to be the only heat in these rooms. When I was a little girl, we burned wood in the fireplace and I remember running into the living room every morning to stand in front of the fire before getting dressed. Often there was an animal of some kind by the fire – a baby lamb, newborn calf or pig that needed some extra attention to survive. I’m not sure why animals pick the coldest nights to give birth, but that seems to be the way it is. The dogs were happy to have me in their domain – pressing cold noses to my face occasionally to make sure I was okay. Joey was the only one willing to burrow into the small space on the couch with me, but Sophie slept right beside the couch. Scout guarded the door and Carli slept at the other end of the couch.
After the first night, I learned a couple of things. One was to light the kerosene lamp before it got dark. Another was to arrange my bedding on the couch while it was still daylight. And always make sure you know where the flashlight is before you go to bed.
The sun came out the next morning and transformed the landscape into a sparkling jewelry box. Even though I hated it for the people working out in the ice to clear road and restore power, it was breathtakingly beautiful, trees draped in diamonds reflecting every color of the rainbow. I used a few bars of battery to snap a few pictures with my phone, but it didn’t capture the effect. Birds swarmed the feeders, breaking the silence with their chirps and arguments.
I read two books, worked three jigsaw puzzles, ate cake and snack crackers, wished for a battery operated cd player so I could have music, took everything out of set of cabinets and began sorting through stacks of old photo albums, played with the dogs, and filled bird feeders several times a day.
In the love/hate relationship I have with social media and news, I realized how valuable it can be to bring people together. The only means of charging my phone was to plug in to my running car periodically and that meant braving the icy driveway. The bright side was that it was the only time I was truly warm unless I was under my layers of cover. As much as I hate the news, not knowing what was happening outside my little corner of the world was worrying at times and I was eager to hear from friends about how they were doing. We really are too addicted to our phones. Missing the contact for a few days made me realize the aloneness our ancestors must have felt with no instant communication or easy travel. Not only were lines down, but roads were blocked so many people couldn’t get in or out if they needed to.
We are not as self sufficient as we used to be. My dad and granddaddy would have taken the tractor and the chain saw and cut the trees out of the road. I don’t have a chain saw (although I have always wished for one), couldn’t use it if I had it and it would probably have been out of gas or out of order anyway. My neighbors got the road cleared on Tuesday but I knew my car would not make it out of my own driveway so I stayed put.
I did discover that I could make do pretty well for a seventy-year-old, with a lot of help from my young neighbor and her grandfather. I learned that I could live on peanut butter, cold sandwiches and cake. I also discovered the joy of putting words on paper using an actual pencil instead of typing them out on the computer. But I was surely happy when I saw the big truck from the electric company on my road on Wednesday morning. And when the lights and heat suddenly came on at noon, I said a little prayer of thanks, along with a heap of prayers for all the people still without electricity. I was one of the lucky ones.
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