How It All Went Down - Part I

Before I get started, I'm afraid this may sound like whining, but that is not my intention. I'm trying to write up how this Christmas weekend went.

I know we were lucky - no one died, the cattle are fine, and we didn't get 43 inches of snow - but it was still one of the worst Christmases I've ever had. But it will definitely be memorable, and in some ways, it was possibly the best Christmas I will ever have. Who knows?

The problem was I had anticipated a great Christmas weekend. I expected Friday to bake, make a cheeseball, all of that holiday stuff that makes the house smell good and that gives the tummy the yummies.

Usually, my father and stepmother come by on Christmas Eve. Later, my brother comes over and I enjoy those visits. We've opened our presents from one another on Christmas Eve since we were small children; it's a tradition, one of the few we have, really.

Some years I have an open house and lots of people come by, though we haven't done that since the pandemic began. Then Christmas Day is generally quiet. My husband and I open presents, we visit with his mom, maybe go to my father's house.

That's what I was expecting. My father and stepmother had Covid, so I knew we wouldn't see them, but I was looking forward to time with my brother.

None of that happened, except my husband and I exchanged presents Christmas morning.

This write-up will be a long narrative. It's writing practice, really, an effort to convey how things were for us this weekend. It's just a slice of life. Feel free to critique. Or not read. Whatever.

Thursday night, December 22, the winds began to howl. Around midnight, the noise woke me. I lay listening to the sound of pinecones or small sticks hitting the siding of the house. Eventually I drifted back to sleep. When the alarms went off, the bed was warm and we snuggled a bit too long before getting up. I wasn't ready to send my husband out into those cold temperatures and that wind, but I knew he would have to care for the cattle.

I took my medication and my husband took his. He ate some sausage for breakfast. The lights blinked once. "I'm going to get a shower," I told him. 

I stepped in the shower and began to get wet.

Then the power went out.

I was drenched but not soapy. I hurried to turn off the water to preserve what was in the tank. "The power's out!" my husband helpfully yelled as I tried to find my towel in the darkness of the bathroom.

"Bring me a flashlight," I shrieked.

"What?"

He came toward the bathroom. I could hear the backup battery in my office beeping. "Turn off my computer for me," I said. I heard him plod down the hall and into my office. I realized he'd already put on his work boots and knew there would be dirt all over the hall.

He went back to the kitchen.

"Goddamn it, APCO doesn't have a customer service number in the phone book!" my husband said. He continued to mutter and rant about the power company and its unreliable service.

I dried off without a flashlight. "I'll call them, go check on the cattle and the watering troughs," I called out.

"You'd think as much as they keep raising the rates, they would have a number in the phone book!" my husband yelled back. We were shouting at one another from opposite ends of the house.

"I'll put the outage in on the app on my phone," I called back. "Or find a number in my 2012 book I have in my office."

"I bet you don't find a number, they don't want you to report an outage," he snarled.

By this time, I'd dried off and put on my clothes. My hair was wet, and I toweled it dry.

I looked in the hallway and sure enough, there was dirt. "Go feed the cattle, I'm going to have to sweep the floor," I told him. "I'll report the outage."

He left, slamming the door and cursing the power company as he went. I picked up my phone and went to the power company's website and reported the outage. Then I swept up the dirt he tracked in.

The thermometer said 9 degrees. The winds were blowing about 45 mph. I wondered how long it would take the house to cool down.

I ate a bowl of Cheerios without milk (which is how I always eat them), and then made the bed. I picked up the dirty clothes and carried them to the laundry room. I emptied the clean dishes from the dishwasher and put the dirty ones in it.

The house grew colder.

My husband returned and reported that a line was down about 100 yards from our driveway. Time to pull out the generator. This was going to be a long outage.

The portable generator is heavy, but he had brought it to the back door the day before because we had anticipated a problem.

I had to back the car out of the garage so he could have space to run extension cords. We used these to power the refrigerator, freezer, and a small space heater. After I looked at the outage map, I suspected we might be without power until the next day.

Our house is wired so that, once the mains are off, we can run the generator through the circuit breaker box. It won't run the heat, the hot water heater, the stove, or the washer and dryer, but it will run lights, the small TV, space heaters, and the microwave. It also gives us water to flush the toilets. Just not hot water.

The last time we'd ran the generator through the circuit breaker box, my husband blew up an air purifier and the electric box on one of the sofas, so I went around and unplugged everything I could before he hooked the generator up.

People were checking on us by this time, too. My brother and my friend T. texted to see if we needed anything. We were ok so far, but I asked my brother to come by to help my husband connect the generator, since he was in the area. He stopped by but we did not talk much, since they were working and doing guy things.

My husband asked me to go to Bellacinos and get hot sandwiches. I agreed and pulled on my heaviest coat. I had only a little pair of knit gloves, and no hat, though the coat had a hood. I had to sit in the car for a few minutes to let the ice that had built up on the windshield melt. Where did the ice come from? The car had been in the garage where there was some humidity, and as soon as I pulled it outside, it did a flash freeze over the windshield.

Once I could see, I drove to Daleville, dodging tree limbs and icy spots in the road as I went. At Bellacinos, I went to the restroom, hoping for soap and warm water; I had the water but not the soap and no towels. I dried my hands on my jeans, fetched our food, and went back outside for the return ride home.

The winds had diminished some, but the frigid temperatures left me wishing I had on more clothes even with the car heater going full blast. My winter attire leaves something to be desired, since I try not to go out in bad weather anymore.

After I returned home, we ate our sandwiches. My husband had tried to convince his mother to go to his sister's house, but it was nearly dark before she agreed to go. I had worried about her all day because I knew the house was cooling off. Plus, she'd probably lost all of her food in the refrigerator.

Our house was down to about 60 degrees. Cool, but tolerable. I kept walking around, moving, because it was warmer to do that than to sit under a blanket.

Dinner that night was cold chicken with a side of broccoli that I heated in the microwave.

I had no internet, and we have a very low data plan on my cellphone, which I used up by constantly checking the power company's website for updates. We were in an area with 65 people out, including my mother-in-law, my nephew, and my cousin.

My nephew also went to his mother's, so my sister-in-law had a houseful with her son, his wife, their two children, and her mother. I could only imagine what it was like over there. At least they were warm and safe.

For a while, my husband and I sat and looked at one another. I read a magazine. He talked on his cellphone to various people. He checked in on his cousin, who, like us, was staying with the house to ensure the pipes didn't freeze. They made a plan to try to hook up this tractor PTO generator to my husband's mother's house Saturday morning if the power had not returned.

Around 7 p.m., my husband decided to go to his mother's to see if she had another space heater we could use. He returned, and then needed to put gas in the generator.

"Go turn on the lights on the car so I can see what I'm doing," he said.

I went out to the car and the dashboard was lit up like a rocketship control panel, including, I noted with dismay, the battery indicator. 

The car wouldn't start, nor would the headlights burn.

"Did you not turn the car all the way off?" I asked him. "The battery is dead."

There was much cursing then that I will not repeat. My husband hopped in his truck and went to the shed to retrieve the battery charger, which he hooked to my car when he returned.

By then it was about 0 degrees, and the winds were still blowing, though not as hard. I was freezing. He was cold and angry. The battery charger indicated a cell in the battery was dead. I went inside and found a number for the local Advanced Auto Parts to see what their hours were. As I hung up, my husband said he had the car running.

"Advanced closes at 9," I said. 

"Good girl," he said, because I'd had sense enough to call.

He left then to have a new battery put in the car. I worried that the generator might run out of gas before he returned, but it didn't. 

I took off my coat, sat down, and had a good cry, one of those that alternates between laughing and crying. It was crazy, the car dying on this day, when the power was out, and absolutely nothing was going as expected. I was cold and I wanted a hot shower, which I knew I wasn't going to get. I finally hiccupped and pulled myself together.

He came back and filled the generator tank with gas.

By this time, it was about 8:30 p.m.

It had been a very long day.

And we still had to get him clean so he could get in the bed.

We are both rather fastidious people, to be farmers. We take lots of showers, change our clothes a lot, and wash our hands frequently. He had been around the hay and the cattle. He wasn't going to bed dirty.

I heated water in a glass dish in the microwave and carried it to him in the bathroom. He took what he called a whore bath, otherwise known as a sponge bath, while I ferried bowls of hot water to him from the kitchen. He then bravely put his head under the sink and washed his hair with cold water, until I returned with a bowl of hot water that I promptly dumped over his head.

Generally, I take a bath before bedtime, too, a quick jump in and out to wash the day out of my hair so that it doesn't upset my allergies and asthma, but I passed. I couldn't be but so dirty, right?

To Be Continued