People dedicate music for various reasons: to show love, to show hate, to show murderous intent (this actually happened. I am not kidding. A guy made a playlist to murder his wife), to show obsession, to show sadness. I have a dedication myself at the moment.
I clear my throat and say,
"Dear Electricity:
You're hot and you're cold,
You're yes and you're no,
You're in and you're out,
You're up and you're down."
My area of the country has just been ravaged by severe winds and in one place a tornado. Tornados do not happen where I live. We have rednecks, escaped pigs and cows (long story), more rednecks, and fog, but not tornados. So, when my family heard gusting wind over the cranked-up sounds of our TV, we knew something was amiss.
My family has our own business, so to protect the assets my dad and brother rushed into the wind and dust to save the machinery. My sister and I of course followed them out, like the idiots we are (at least I am). The scene resembled the opening crisis of The Wizard of Oz. The wind threw the driveway dust into the air and flung it into the bending tree branches. The air moaned and bellowed like a giant vacuum cleaner. Clusters of leaves broke and slapped on the ground, on the cars, and onto us. Those that remained on the trees turned to show their paler, more private undersides to the public; that old omen predicted a storm coming, but it was here.
I did not leave the porch. When I felt a few twigs hit my face, I realized it would be really stupid to go out at that moment. Therefore, I waited about 90 seconds and then ran into the wind hydraulic barefooted––because I'm stupid and awesome like that.
The storm died down just as quickly as it came. One moment, everything was a'bluster, and the next, we saw in the destruction in the weird, ghostly twilight that storms give. Halves of trees had split from giant oaks and now hung like slashed crinolines against their trunks. Bunches of leaves, still stuck to their bits of branch, scattered the yard and wrecked the once neat yard. My sister took issue with the weather, since she had spent hours cleaning it earlier.
The wind still gusted, but it had lost its heart. It no longer blew like it was in blood lust, but rather was angry that someone had eaten its last cookie (what kind of cookies does the wind eat? I have no idea. Perhaps pine cones. Or things that look like pine cones.). We all gathered chairs and sat in the middle of what was left of the lawn to watch the sky as it lashed the trees and tried to blow the rest of their leaves off. The trees bent double, and I wondered how much more they could take before they broke. My dad gave up on the chair and opted for the sidewalk, which was still baking hot because of the day's heat. I joined him, and the warmth felt good on my back.
The house lights were out, and the electricity remained gone for a few days. We had to ration out the water, manage how often the fridge and freezer were opened, outlaw flushing the toilet, and walk around the house with candles like we were witches. Thank God our stove is propane, our else I would not have been able to have my hot tea fix. I might have died. I need my hot tea.
All in all, the electricity going out was great fun. We had to employ the generator, to keep the freezer full of meat still frozen (remember when I mentioned escaped pigs and cows? Mu ha hah), but we handled it well. Despite the prediction that the repair would take a week, we had our electricity again by the next afternoon.
Of course, the it then shorted out a few hours later. We returned to our medieval life. I pulled out the books and made some more hot tea. We went to the cabin and roasted burgers and hot dogs while running around a giant fire (I was barefooted, of course, and ran much too close to the licking flames). We went home, and the next day, after another blustery thunderstorm, the electricity came on.
We enjoyed it. My mother baked, the rest of the family watched TV, and I had more hot tea and finished half of a thick Harry Potter book. It was magnificent. Then, the rains came, and the winds blew, and the lightning crashed with a bright magnificence.
The power went out.
So here I am, bored and blogging in town, staring at my empty traveling mug and wishing there was more tea. I am biding my time until I can get home, eat some biscuits with a new pot of brew, and perhaps find the modern, quite superfluous, and absolutely required invention of electricity back in place.
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