Outage
Yesterday at 5pm, our power went out. A fierce storm pushed a power pole over Franklin Avenue and onto a tree. The whole contraption was emitting smoke and sparks when I passed it on my bike. Not big arcs of movie sparks and smoke. Just lazy tendrils of smoke and the occasional ominous sparking sound. It reminded me a steam engine that had run out of steam.
Mykala and I didn’t realize the power had gone out until we returned home at 9pm. It turns out that the power was uninterrupted until repair work began; before that (when the whole contraption was draped over the street), electricity was still flowing just fine. Here’s the thing about losing power in the summer — it’s hot. Really, really hot. Humid. Still. Dark. Sticky. Mykala lit a candle, causing me to launch a 10 minute campaign convincing her to extinguish it. We then sat there in the dark for 5 minutes, letting our eyes adjust until we could see that the drapes were completely still, despite our attempts to catch a breeze. “Let’s go to bed,” Mykala said. It wasn’t even 10pm.
We opened the one window in our bedroom that wasn’t stuck shut or taken over by a air conditioner, and Mykala began reading by book light. We both started sweating. And sweating. And sweating. I went to bed clean, and had to take a shower this morning before I went into clinic. By the time lunch rolled around, I was starving. Had I even been able to bike home in time for lunch, I would’ve found the power still out.
Apparently, at about 2:15pm, after 21 hours of outage-ness, the power returned to our duplex. It took quite a while to get all the spoiled food out of the fridge, and to launder the really sweaty sheets. Tonight, I’m going up to bed to a dark, quiet, 70°F air-conditioned bedroom. I’m going to climb into clean sheets and sleep. Sleep uninterrupted by sweating, extremely loud birds, thunderstorms forcing the closure of the only open window, weird dreams about spoiling food, or any number of things. Just really nice sleep.
I love electricity.