11.08.13   On my way up our road to the grocery store yesterday afternoon,  I wanted to take a photograph that might capture what a thoroughly horrible weather day it had been.  The worst we ever experience, in my opinion–33 degrees with fog and pouring rain on top of snow and soggy leaves.  Even in the house, in the heat of ironing, I put on one of my old Irish knit sweaters and tied a scarf around my neck.  The furnace was humming along just fine, but I could not pass the wall of windows facing the flat, gray lake, shrouded in fog, without shivering.  To think it is just the end of the first week of November.

I made a lovely Provencal soup and we settled into the library to watch a movie while the soup warmed and soothed us from the raw day.  We heard a pop–a transformer–and all the power went out.  Such a time-out-of-time moment when all is suddenly dark and eerily quiet.  It was strange to lose electricity without wind, and the rain was still dripping off the roof, so ice wasn’t the problem.  We lit all the candles and used the battery lantern to quickly rinse the soup bowls, knowing the water pressure in the pump to the well would soon be gone.  I used the flashlight on my iPhone to brush my teeth.  We called the new young neighbors up on the highway to see if they had lost power–they had.  They’re both nurses who work the night shift at the hospital in town, and I found it comforting that they were home to share this outage with us.  We could have read by candle or flashlight, but it was close enough to bedtime that we just bundled up for sleep in a cold house.  Sometime in the middle of the night, the lights came back on.

I’d read a poem yesterday morning about the radio.  All day long, I’d listened to our public radio station for company during a dreary day.  Like the author, I, too, often light up my dark winter house in this way.  Last night, there wasn’t even the radio.

Radio (by David Lehman)
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
“After You’ve Gone”
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark