At about noon last Thursday, June 29th, the emergency sirens went off. We immediately began herding cats, always a thrilling event. The rain started coming down and we didn’t have time to look out and see what was going on because, well, herding cats. Finally, most of them were in the basement except Riley who was lying outside the high basement window, refusing to come inside. Kevin cut the screen in order to coax him in but Riley was having none of that. There’s an overhang in front of that window so he wasn’t getting wet, or swept off by the tornado or whatever it was. As we’d been herding, at some point the power went off.
We sat on the basement steps listening to the weather radio and it the storm was over pretty quickly.
We released the cats and went outside to look around. A giant tree-sized limb had crashed down in the back and it had many branches coming off it and they covered a whole lot of lawn. Many smaller branches were lying all over the place, and more in the front.
Spot, of course, was right there to help us survey the damage. Poor kitty, he must have been terrified during the storm.
We couldn’t send a text or make a call on our cell phones so that was weird. Amy and Jim next door were also without power but lucky for her, mom has a whole-house generator so she was in business.
We’re still without power, here on the 4th of July. It has been hot and humid the last couple of days, but it will hopefully cool down by Thursday. We might have power by Sunday night, but we might not.
The thing is, on Thursday we didn’t hear any news from anywhere, because, of course, no Internet, and we kept thinking the power would go back on. We watched the local news at Mom’s ‘s house at 5 PM but it didn’t offer a lot of information, except that there were lots of trees down and power outages. We had no idea of the scope of the damages.
On Thursday night Kevin plugged in our portable generator to power our fridge and our freezer. The generator has four plug-ins, so Amy and Jim used the other two. Kevin ran an extension cord in order to power our devices, but it wasn’t until Friday that Kevin thought of running an extension cord to our AC unit in the bedroom.
Things feel really strange right now. It has been difficult to think of obvious things like running more extension cords in order to plug in a couple of lights. We were able to plug in the fan in the living room, but today it finally occurred to me to get a giant fan out of another room and set that up in the living room. It has made it much more bearable in here. It’s like my brain is not working right.
Many people all over town have no power, and I know there are people who don’t have generators. It must be terrible for them.
Yesterday I went to the movies, the new Indiana Jones, and I’d read some bad reviews, but I didn’t care, I just wanted to sit there in the air conditioning. That was very nice (and I thought the movie was great!) but when I got out of the movie theater, Amy sent me an NPR article that detailed the extent of the damages. That’s when we found out that we probably won’t have power until Sunday night, and maybe not even then. Right now we are living in the middle of something that we will talk about years from now.
Hopefully we’ll talk about it years from now, if the plague of locusts doesn’t arrive but they’d be giant killer locusts who would destroy civilization.
Right before the storm we were dealing with very unhealthy air from the Canadian wildfires. So at least the storm blew the smoke away…
On Friday, after we had been without power for 24 hours, I texted Amy and told her that it was like that little house on the prairie book, the long winter, where Pa had to twist hay into “logs,” and his hands froze and bled. I told Amy that if we were living in those times, we would certainly be dead by now.
This too shall pass.
Or not.
Here’s a photo of darling Riley, before the end of days started.
There are many other things I wanted to say but my brain isn’t being very cooperative right now. More later, or maybe in a while.
ok then,
g.