Power, electricity

This morning I was struck by the difference in the worlds of the people I have been writing about and mine. Our power went out just before dawn. We were up early as B. has to drive to Savannah. The lack of light was one thing, but there was also the lack of sound. No hum of refrigerator, no electronic murmur from the computer or television. The school buses and cars going up and down the street outside seemed suddenly to be inside the house and a helicopter flying around and around the area seemed to be trying to come in the windows. The high whine of an airplane could be heard and the complaints of a few birds waking to this wet chill morning.

I lit candles in the bathroom and den, places where the dark pools in this house. The flames seemed huge, important, vital. They illuminated so much more than expected. But then the lights came on and the candles were reduced to ornaments, even if the electric light was just filtering in from another room.

I shall never know what it would have been like to depend on stoves heated with wood for my morning tea, or to have to draw water from an outside well, or how long the evenings must have seemed in the winter with only the fire and a candle for company.