Last Friday, when the summer sun had set and we had just returned home from a day out, a windstorm of twisting momentum crashed into our neighborhood. The Derecho was widespread over multiple states with little rain and maximum fury. Like a lot of others, we lost power.Being the farm girl I am, I diligently lit candles and waited for the lights to come back on. That's what you do where I'm from. You play board games, fill tubs with water (just in case), and read by candlelight for two to three days. Since moving to the city, power normally is restored in a few hours.
The first few days passed without even a flicker of light, and the temperatures predicted to be near or over one hundred degrees kept their promises. With no air conditioning and no breezes, you can imagine the house heated effortlessly during the days to ninety degrees inside, and barely cooled off to eighty during the nights. The Hubs, our daughter Z, and I sweat along with the best of them. I washed clothes in the bathtub and hung them to dry each day, and we cooked food and made coffee over an open flame.
Day five brought with it an overheated car and then an abrupt complication which left us not only hot and sticky, stinky and hungry, but motionless. The idea of running out for a cool drink or going somewhere with working A/C was gone. With no power to recharge my computer and now no way to plug in somewhere else, what's a girl to do?