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Power! (A follow-up on Helene) [1]
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Date: 2024-09-28
43 hours without power. It’s not so much the heat, it’s the humidity inside the house when you don’t have AC that makes it hard to breathe. I was lucky. Nothing fell in my yard that was heavier than I could move to the fire pit. Down the street some trees fell, but people had chainsaws and they didn’t have screens to distract them since screens run on a certain kind of power that was gone and chainsaws work on another kind that wasn’t gone, so they took their chainsaws and made short work of it.
The wind blew harder than I was expecting. I live on a state highway where there’s often a lot of traffic noise, and just before my power went out, I thought, “Wow, there’s a lot of people on the road.” It only took me a second to think, “Get real, Nancy. There’s nobody out there driving right now.” Hurricane wind sounds like highway traffic but steadier and shriller. And after a while of hearing it, it’s eerier, especially when you hear the pop of the tree branches snapping.
I haven’t read all the comments on my last diary because when power is gone, you have to conserve what you have. So I walked in the neighborhood and was happy to see that Cliff got his generator going so he could keep his mom’s meds refrigerated. I actually got to spend time with Oden and Freya, my new 8 and 5 year old neighbors, because I had some silly rubber blow up balls that I don’t think about when I’m doing screen time, but I thought about them when I didn’t, and Oden and Freya liked them. And their mom liked the zinnias I’d grown from seed and I put them in a vase and took them her to welcome her to the neighborhood. There’s many more stories of actual real life I could tell, but I hope you get the picture.
I’m super happy to have electricity back, but I’m not sorry we lost it. Sometimes you get an opportunity to realize there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t involve screens, and it’s a good one. You might even say it’s powerful.
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