Lightness

Most is peaceful around here this morning. Libby is curled up around a teddy bear asleep on the couch. Katie is zonked out on the love seat, and Evan is lurking because he is not supposed to be out of bed before 6:00 a.m. Don is feeding the dogs so they are a teensy bit overly excited. (The food followed by their walk is a highlight of the basic doggy day.) Last night was less peaceful. In fact, it was overly exciting.
Don had a rehearsal. Erin had a temp that soared over 103. (104 is where I head for an E.R., quack shack, or M.D.) She was miserable. I phoned Don. Gave ibuprofen and insisted that Little Bit drink. It was a big relief to see the temp start to go down after an anxious hour. (Not being anxious is hard to do when there's a child staring at you with gigantic blue eyes that plead and fully expect for Mom to make her better.) We passed a fairly quiet half hour after her temp came down.
Thankfully, Evan went to bed during that time and fell asleep. The power went out. I don't mean a flicker. I mean no power at all. I grabbed one of the flashlights from our Christmas light walks, and headed off to climb into the recesses of my closet to get the emergency candles and some decorative ones I had stashed while talking to the girls in my best crisis counselor voice. Once we had a dozen votives lit (sitting on whatever flat glass surfaces I could find from a pie plate on a riser to a cake plate) and the fat Christmas candle from the dining room, I decided to check outside since the girls seemed reassured by the soft light after being in pitch dark. There was not a single light up and down the creek (Okay, the realtor called it a creek. It's really a drainage ditch with trees and a green swathe of grass.) or the street out front where half the neighbors have buried their homes under twinkling lights they do not fail to turn on nightly.
The cell phone network was busy, and without electricity there's no internet connection and no home phone since they both require the router and the phones to have an electrical source of power. I reached Ally who was going to try to find out by phone or internet what was going on in our neighborhood with the power. I phoned Don at rehearsal--- again reaching him only after waiting for the call to go through. He was heading home, and he would pick up a few more candles in jars on his way. A neighbor from across the neighborhood phoned via cell to see if our power was out, too.
Evan would have just flipped out, but he did not wake. The boy has a serious fear of the dark. He also dislikes candles because he has a certainty that they will burst into massive flames, and he puts them out every time I light one. Last night's power outage would have caused him some serious conflict between darkness and fire. (That would have caused me and the girls some serious craziness.)
The animals were keeping life interesting. The cat really wanted to play with those dancing flames. Our big dogs have those giant swishing tales that threatened to knock the candles from the tables. I shut them up in our bedroom and ignored the meowing, woofing, and whimpering coming through the door. Ally arrived because she could not reach me by phone, and I had concerns about the charge on mine. We dug up an electric bill so she could phone our provider.
No explanation was available, so she called Jose to put him to work calling the actual company providing the service to the lines. She hung around until we knew that the lines were being "worked on" and Don was on his way with the additional candles. Naturally, the power was restored shortly after he returned home.
We are blessed. After making do with space heaters and an electric blanket for keeping warm, the new furnace was installed in time to warm the whole house yesterday afternoon and evening. The house was warm enough to maintain the more comfortable temperature. That would have been highly unlikely with the more meager heat of the space heaters, blanket, and whatever the oven and clothes dryer generated with their regular use. I felt a lightness as I returned to darkness around midnight to finally crawl into bed and fall asleep without adjusting the electric blanket or getting up to check the heaters and the kids' blankets throughout the night for the first time in weeks.