Nov 23, 2018 4 min read

It started with a flicker, just the slightest pop of indecision followed by a hem and haw of on and off, and then the TV went blank and stayed that way. At 10:20 a.m. one week ago today, the electricity went off.

This happened when I was in the chair with knitting needles in my hands. In those first seconds of quiet, you stop and wait, expecting the lights to come right back on. But after three minutes, I knew this was an actual power outage.

It would last for 76 hours.

I didn’t know that, of course. A power outage is like a bad cold, an open-ended ordeal that’s unpredictable in its duration. As I draped a blanket over my shoulders, I naively thought of the worst-case scenario: the power would be off for three hours. I could go to the gym, then to the grocery store, and I’d return home to bright warmth, like it never happened.

But darkness greeted me. By then, the farmer had built a fire in the fireplace, a good effort that adds a bit of heat but mostly just ambience.

“I’ll fire up the generator,” he said.

By evening, the house was empty and dark except for candlelight and the buzz of the generator, which was keeping the freezer cold. I was struck by the irony: As we sat shivering, our only source of energy was devoted to keeping something cold.

It would be a three-dog night, and we have only two. I thought of the article I’d just read, about how sleeping in a chilly room can cause weight loss. I dreamt of waking up eighth-grade skinny.

It’s funny how a house gets knitted into our muscle memory. Twenty-four hours into the outage, and I was still flicking on the light switch every time I entered a room. Sitting in the den, the farmer reached for the TV remote. And then he remembered.

I had a film shoot on Saturday, and was out of the house all day. Surely the crews would fix the problem by the time I was home. But no. The farmer hooked the generator to the furnace.

That generator, no bigger than a carry-on suitcase, was our Little Engine that Could. Three hours on the furnace brought us close to 70 degrees. And then it was the water heater’s turn.

And that’s how it went, with the farmer and the generator keeping things humming just enough, and at the right intervals, to prevent misery.

“We’re Ma and Pa Ingalls,” I said.

“They didn’t have a generator,” the farmer said.

Sometimes we watch the reruns of “The Little House on the Prairie” while dinner’s in the oven. But not then.

How spoiled we’ve become. Without TV or internet, I was adrift. What was happening in the world? What was I missing as I sat in the dark?

There are people on this planet who are suffering far more. A power outage is not such a hardship, considering. And yet, I was getting cranky. I felt like I was on a plane that wasn’t allowed to land.

Monday afternoon, the farmer spotted a service truck far up the lane and ran up there in his bathrobe, ankle socks and slippers.

“They said the power will be back on directly,” he said when he returned.

An hour later, it was. I logged into my work email with eagerness that would suggest I’d been out of the country for a year. When I’d walked into the room, I flicked on the light switch. And it worked.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.