Ice

There's a small army of trucks emblazoned with logos of an electric utility thundering past on the state highway outside my window, followed by the green of the trusty township plow and cinder truck. Likely they're making more permanent repairs to the grid after last night's power loss.

It went off here just as we were getting into the latest episode of All Creatures Great and Small on the television. Sunday night we settle in, dishes from dinner stashed away, leftovers refrigerated, for 60 Minutes and then the offerings on Masterpiece - it's just a comforting habit though now everything is available on demand. 

But Sunday evenings have always had their own rhythm even since childhood when some Disney program or another came on the Heimel family television and Dad would sometimes go down to the store and come back with a carton of ice cream and a can of Hershey's syrup. One of the older boys would carefully scribe the ice cream and slice through it with what my mother called an angel food cake cutter, taking great care that each portion was equal - most important in a family of seven.

These were the days when so-called "blue laws" closed all the stores on Sunday. We were exempt from that inconvenience as my father worked at the family's grocery store and he had a key. Other families had to plan ahead for a Sunday treat, but we were special, an interesting introduction to the concept of privilege. 

Raising our own family, we also enjoyed the Disney offerings and later it was Mrs. Fletcher solving all kinds of crime from her beautiful bungalow along the Maine coast. In those days, I had the ironing board set up adjacent to the action and Arthur was off in the other room ostensibly writing lesson plans or correcting papers but more often lost in musicland.

But last night, power blinked off and on and finally we were truly in the dark. I lit a candle - Yankee Candle Christmas Cookie - and used my phone's flashlight feature to fetch real flashlights from the laundry room cupboard. Arthur unplugged the kitchen range just for good measure even though the fancy breaker it was plugged into snapped it off at the first blink, and we waited.

No internet - no power and it was soon off to bed. Arthur read in the light of his headlamp and I used my Kindle, charged in full with a selection of reading material already downloaded.

Power returned in an hour or so but Arthur was already asleep and I couldn't bring myself to go down the stairs and reboot the system to go back to Skeldale House and then laugh with the Saturday Night Live Anniversary Special we had been looking forward to. It was just too cold and the bed was so cozy and warm. 

It's most certainly has been miserably cold, snowy, icy and windy outside- matching what's going on inside this old farmhouse- two colds to soldier through, accompanied by the icy disaster of this new presidency raining down on our heads with winds of most unwelcome change knocking these two septuagenarians off course.