Let There Be Light

Early Thursday morning, it started snowing, which persisted into Friday. This would not be out of the ordinary in many parts of the world, which I realize, but in Texas that much snowfall is most unusual.

On Thursday night schools started canceling class for Friday and local weathermen were having a heyday because of the record-setting inches which kept falling. Emails started buzzing about snowball fights and huddling up indoors to watch movies and drink cocoa.

Friday morning I woke up and immediately attempted to turn on my TV to see what the traffic and road conditions would be for trying to get to work. No luck. I then tried turning on the lamp on to my left next to my bed. No luck again. I sat up in bed and brushed the top of my duvet, which was freezing.

We had lost power.

I washed my face and threw on jeans and a North Face because there would have been no way of drying shower-wet hair, nor was I having much luck finding anything in the darkness of my closet. I was even on my hands and knees feeling each one of my shoes as I would imagine a blind person reads Braille. Efforts at looking presentable were futile.

My roommates kept me up to speed with the power-situation throughout the day, which was that we didn't have any, and MG told me that we could stay with her parents who live five minutes from our house, until our power returned. I drove home after work to check our house and get what I needed to stay away from home for a night so that I could have everything settled.

Friday was my dear friend AVs birthday, and a group of us drove from Dallas to Ft. Worth to eat dinner at Joe T. Garcia's and then go to Billy Bob's for a Miranda Lambert concert. MK was driving us and while trying to park in a snowy field next to the concert hall for $5, her car got stuck. AV, CC and I hopped out of the car in our cowboy boots and started pushing while MK tried the gas pedal to get the car to budge. I was thankful to be wearing old cowboy boots that can withstand the elements, because we were sliding all over the place after falling knees to the ground into the snow and finally getting MK's car moving.

AV has had more white birthdays in recent years than I have, a fact of which I am supremely jealous because I also have a winter birthday but very few of my 25 have seen snow. We scurried inside to get out of the cold wind with our cold and now muddy tights, and MK threw a snowball at me as I told her to "walk with purpose" after she was offering up ill-advised piggy-back rides.

We had a great time and I returned to MG's family's home feeling like a teenager sneaking in after curfew. I woke up Saturday morning to find that the G's were also harboring MG's brother, his wife and their golden retriever, who live a street over from us and were also still without power. Seven people and three dogs under the same roof.

We made more trips to our house after coming to terms with the fact that we would need more clothing to survive the weekend, and somehow I ended up bringing five pairs of boots into the room where I was staying. Five pairs of boots and my own room and bathroom in the G's house... you can tell we were really roughing it, can't you?

MG and I were feeling both productive and a little helpless today after church and finally decided to face the carnage of our refrigerator before it got any worse. With the power still out, we opened all the blinds in the kitchen and filled four trash bags with the contents of both our fridge and freezer, save for the alcohol, which was unaffected. I ascertained during the purge that we have an affinity for cheese, hummus, barbeque sauce and frozen pizza at our house. On the bright side, our fridge has not been this clean since the day Home Depot delivered it.

KS and I went to dinner tonight (she was a lovely Valentine, I must say) and while eating I got an email beep on my phone that MG's brother had sent, telling us our power was back on. We bolted as soon as we could sign our checks at the restaurant, did a quick drive past our house to make sure he wasn't playing a cruel older-brother joke on us and confirmed the power was indeed on, then went back to pack our things. No one else was home and we left a note but otherwise I felt like we were thieves in the night, stealing away with bags of ours clothing, hair-dryers, boot collections and other essentials that had been brought with us. The G's could not have been better hosts- I think we were just thrilled at the idea of waking up in our own beds and not having to make anymore trips for those one or two things we forgot at home.

My immediate concern after packing up was the fact that we were now without coffee creamer at home. This may seem trivial, but when you can make the world's greatest coffee at your house and you've been without it for three days, your priorities change accordingly. Never mind milk and bread; I needed Original Fat-Free Coffee-Mate. I went three places to find it too.

Our refrigerator is now home to multiple bottles of beer, wine, prosecco, strawberry yogurt and Coffee-Mate, naturally. The freezer has ice-cubes and one loner bottle of Tanqueray gin.

Home sweet home... and happy Valentine's day.

He made the world to be a grassy road before her wandering feet.

-W.B. Yeats