11 February 2010
Happy Birthday, William
I would love to think that my brother William would actually see this at some point, and know for sure that I remember such things and that I love him. But, he won’t. I did actually call him tonight, though, and wish him a happy birthday personally. The timing wasn’t good for either of us to have a long conversation—I think he was on the phone with mama—and he said he’d call back. Moments later, our electricity went off and phone calls couldn’t happen. Someday, we’ll have the rest of that birthday conversation.
Today’s photo tells the story of our day here in North Texas. We woke up to almost three inches of snow. On his way down the driveway and off to work, Kyle drew this heart in the snow on my truck windshield and I ran to get my camera. I took a few more photos, many of which made my cut and are on my Flickr stream. It is such a pretty snow—very wet and very sticky. The trees are gorgeous! But, unfortunately, wet and sticky snow is also very, very heavy. Tree branches are breaking throughout the metroplex and with that comes downed wires. And downed wires means power outages.
We were watching something on television, cuddled on the new sofa, and there was a “pop,” everything went dark, and then, outside the back door I saw the world take on an eerie blue glow. The strange light brightened to almost daylight and then slowly faded to black. “Slowly” is relevant, of course—the whole thing happened in little more than the blink of an eye—probably no more than a second or two. But, “black” really means black.
We are weeks from a full moon, the snow is still falling, so the sky is overcast, anyway, and with no artificial light and no moon and no stars—it is black.
Fortunately candles and oil lamps are always at the ready at our house, so we were easily able to light our way to put the dogs to bed, flip light switches off, brush our teeth (one of the perks of city water rather than the well and pump I grew up with is that you still have water when you have no electricity) and go to bed.
It’s cold, but we have each other.
~MB
But, we were committed to it because we had promised Roxy and Damaris that’s what we would do the night they arrived. And, arrive they did, mid-afternoon. On their way to a faire in Florida, we were grateful that they chose to plan their trip around a visit to us along the way. Sadly, the trivia game on the telly tonight was all sports, so we neither did well nor enjoyed it very much. But, we had a good time and Kelly joined us after she had dinner elsewhere.
