Wintertime in Rome:
it’s all a matter of degrees

    Old Guy and Still-Young Bride awakened Monday morning of last week to the alarm of a battery-operated clock. Previous experience in arriving late for work under power outages has made this timely precaution a nightly ritual. Good thing.

    Like some 3,000 of our neighbors here in the Town of Rome, our electric clocks told us that the power had ceased sometime after 4:00 a.m. By our 6:00 a.m. wake-up ring, it still had not returned.

    Now here’s the thing: Still-Young Bride, somehow always fresh as a daisy, can begin her day sans shower, without a problem. But, Old Guy? Well, not that it matters, but three days earlier I had had some minor outpatient surgery, and a request from the doctor to keep the bandages dry for the weekend. Without a shower for three days, I was extremely past due for a cleaning! But without power, the water pump doesn’t run and the pressure runs out and the hot morning shower is history.

    So, as I bade my departing Bride farewell for the day at 7:15 a.m., I awaited the return of the power and the shower, which, after another hour, made my expression dour. By 10:00 a.m., I was into a third round of calling the friendly folks at the electric co-op, who, bless them, kept an up-to-date recording on their phone line of the progress of the power restoration.

    By noon, Old Guy had drained his water pipes and settled down to a long winter’s snap—of cold. The indoor thermometer read 53 degrees. Zoey-cat was buried under a pile of quilts. Things began looking grim.

    By 6:00 p.m., Old Guy fired up the Honda to join Still-Young Bride for some out-of-house pasta—“The better to keep our internal heat levels up,” she figured. Okay, I’m game.

    Returning home at 7:30 p.m.—power still out—somehow, the gas fireplace worked! And there, in front of our only heat source, we passed away the hours of the evening—she, reading by the light of her cross-country ski headlamp, and me, dozing underneath cat fur—the only living thing that would approach me in my still unwashed state.

    A call from neighbor Elaine Momsen that evening informed us that she had heard from one of the line workers that the power would be back on the next day—or it would be five days later! Brrrrrrrr! How low can that indoor temperature go?

    At 10:00 p.m., we piled the quilts on the bed and snuck under for the night.

    Click! Four-plus hours later, the lights in the bedroom came on and we jumped up singing. I quickly turned on the water pump and turned up the heat. Never had we been so thankful for the things we had, until then, taken for granted.

    Days later we realized, as headlines screamed of earthquake-produced tsunamis and the still-mounting death tolls in eleven countries, that disasters come in degrees.

    And the people of the town of Rome never had it so good.