Limping

~ Laura

I’m blogging on my iPhone right now. I feel like I’m scribbling down a few words on the back of a matchbook and shoving in a bottle.
Sunday’s freak storm piled heavy snow on trees that still had full heads of green leaves. Crack and snap. I cursed myself for not getting around to calling a tree doctor to inspect that mighty oak tree that leans over our family room. Every plop of snow of the roof made me jump. I left my husband alone in the family room and wished him luck.
We lost phone and Internet service, but we were lucky enough to keep our power. In fact, we are the last house on the block to keep power. All the homes to the left of us are in pitch darkness. For miles and miles. We’re on the edge of darkness. At night, youcan hear the hum of hundreds of generators.
I’ll try to throw up a couple of quickie posts today.

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Limping”

  1. Hang in there, Laura! It sounds like it’s been a hell of a storm. Some friends of ours in Connecticut fled south to DC, where they’re crashing with friends to wait out the repairs.

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  2. If you remove the first and last sentence, it sounds like the start of a novel. Probably a dystopian thriller where some kind of infection causes some trees to achieve consciousness and seek revenge on humans.

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  3. We had a week like that a few years ago (and, we too were the fortunate ones who kept our power) after a wild windstorm. But all around us (and across the lake) was pitch darkness.
    A giant cedar broke in half next to our house (but, conveniently for us, fell on the neighbor’s deck, and, thankfully, not in their (or our) daughter’s room).
    Keep safe (plan your emergency kit — my sister is out of power and discovering that she didn’t have spare wood for their wood burning stove or a non-powered radio).
    I enjoy power outages for about the first 36 hours, and then want everything back. Explain the debt crisis to Jonah and then come back when the power is on, and report on the explanation to us.

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  4. I had a tree in the front yard removed earlier this summer because it was half dead. When Irene hit, I felt *really* smart. However, the truth is, who can tell these things will happen? You can’t prepare for every freak occurrence of nature.
    MEMA says 347K still have no power in MA.

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  5. I am feeling very lucky here in South Jersey. Reports of disasterous conditions to the North and West, but we only got a flurry.
    Good luck getting everything turned back on!

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  6. It’s just too hard to blog on an iPhone. I was supposed to send traffic over to the BlogHer website today, because they are featuring one of my blog posts. Oh well.

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  7. Still no Internet. School started up again, but now my kids are home with a stomach bug. I haven’t gotten any writing done in a week and I’m losing my mind.

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  9. It seems that it’s best to live in either a highly-developed environment (like New York City) or a very primitive environment (like our summer house on Fire Island). In the city, the power system is very resilient and we rarely lose power. On Fire Island, you could lose power and not even notice it for hours. It’s that in-between suburban situation where you are vulnerable.

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  10. y81,
    But isn’t an outage in NYC potentially a lot worse if it actually happens? As in, OWS type conditions, but up in a highrise?
    I agree about upside of a more primitive environment. At my parents’ house in the woods in WA, if there’s a power outage, they can just make oatmeal or heat canned soup by sticking a pot on their wood-burning stove. (Of course, the pump for the well runs off electricity, so water supply can be an issue.) I miss having a woodburning stove at home (fireplaces are lame, both for cooking and heating), but at least I don’t have to worry about kids getting burnt or fire safety (I got one or two pretty spectacular burns from fooling around with the wood stove as a kid). In our current home (technically in a city, but with suburban features), we have a almost-never used fireplace. I let my husband stockpile dead branches from our pecan trees so that in case of major winter storms, we’d be able to heat the house for a day or two.

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