The SLUSHPILE Blog

I live in Washington County, Pennsylvania, about an hour south of Pittsburgh. We had the distinction of being the hardest hit county in PA for this past weekend’s “stormageddon’.

We did not escape. But in a way, we did.

Our electric went out at a quarter to eleven Friday night (February 5th). We are fortunate in that we live in a 100 year old farm house which was built before power lines and modern conveniences. Hence, we have a fire place in the living room, and in one upstairs bedroom. The previous owners, two old sisters who had been spinster school teachers, had bowed to progress to the degree that they had boarded over the one fire place in the bedroom, but had upgraded the living room fireplace to a gas burner. They also installed a gas burner in the dining room, on the other side of the house (which, interestingly enough, the gas line continues on up through the floor into mine and my husband’s bedroom above it, and provides a gas lamp above our bed. I’ve never tried working the gas lamp). The upshot was that we had two sources of heat in our home with no more effort than turning a knob and lighting them.

Were we cozy warm? Not always. But we had heat, and we didn’t have to babysit a generator nor worry about kerosene heater fumes (although if our house were better insulated, gas fumes would have been a concern at some point. But true to its heritage, our house is not only old, but drafty. Asphixiation seemed remote.) We continued without electricity all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and did not see it return until ten minutes to six in the evening on Monday (February 8).  We were lucky. Even as I type this onto the glow of my electric powered computer screen, many of our neighbors in the area are still without power, and can not expect it to be on until sometime tomorrow (Thursday).

The coldest our house got was 53 degrees (F) on Saturday morning, when the outside temperature read 3.  We had the ability to cook, as our stove is gas and I eschewed the fancy electronic conveniences offered when last purchasing a new stove about five years ago. “What if the power goes out?” I reasoned at the time. “I want something with knobs that I can still light and get a flame on the burner”. My foresight was appreciated as we served up hot meals and ate by candlelight around the dining room table. It provided a sense of normalcy in an otherwise dark world. The only thing we couldn’t provide normalcy to was our water situation. We have a cistern. A cistern low on water to begin with because the water hauler never got us water before the storm started despite my putting the order in two days prior to the coming storm. A cistern that won’t pump water without electricity anyways.

All day Saturday, we hated life. We played monopoly and waited for the electric to come on. We melted and boiled snow on the stove to wash dishes in. (Little known trivia: it takes twenty-five gallons of snow to get barely enough water to wash and rinse dishes). We brought more snow in and let it melt to flush the toilet with.

All day Sunday, we hated life. We dug out the cars, cleared the sidewalk, the mailbox and the garbage bin. We played more monoply.  We waited for the electric to come on. The phone was dead and the cell phones had used all their batteries. We cooked more meals, melted more snow, washed more dishes. We mourned being unable to watch the Superbowl.

Then on Monday, something funny happened. We woke up to an electronic-less world, but it seemed normal. We had established a routine and we did our chores of melting and clearing snow. Then we played monopoly some more, with a game of Risk and Clue thrown in for good measure. We no longer complained about the chill of the house, the lack of t.v. , computer or video games. We had found a different way of life, one consisting strictly of the necessities of the day: Food, Water, Shelter.

Ironic that as we sat at the table, eating leisurely instead of in a rush, and as I was saying the words: “You know, I don’t think I would exchange the last couple of days for a million dollars. . .” was when the electric came on. The sudden noise of the refrigerator coming on, the water pump running and the furnace kicking in was so deafening after our three days of silence that we initially could not compute what had just happened. “Is that the snow plow?”, “Is that the water guy?”, “What’s that noise?” we all asked each other, nearly in a panic. Then we heard the microwave beeping and we all realized that our exhile was over.

One of our sons rose and flipped on the light. We all stared at it for a moment and then my husband said, “Turn it off,” of which our son did. We finished our meal by candlelight, staving off the real world until the end of our meal. But we had to reflect on which was the real world, the one we were now returned to with the return of our electricity, or the one we were leaving?