What do you do when your home is dark? When the rain comes and the wind gushes, and you reach for the light switch out of habit, but there’s no response? You can’t turn on the stove, the television, the radio.
In Newfoundland hurricane-induced power outages came in winter when you would be so cold without heating that you would need to light a fire or call the gas stove into action that had been rusting away in the basement. But now, the end of summer in Montreal is here and a rainfall is all it is taking to quell even the loudest technological scream. Candles on the table, puzzles and books until it becomes too dark to see the difference between the light blue sky and the chestnut horses on the ground below. The candles creating a glare and white glaze over every piece. And then red wine and conversation – stories, music.
Comfort in human interaction. The world doesn’t stop. People don’t keep to themselves in their own homes, feeling connected by the internet with others a world away who will never touch your skin. We go out into the storm, seek sanctuary with other human souls, offer assistance, share.
The best of us. What is the best of us? Is it offering a car ride to a soaking pedestrian trying to get home? Because cars still work, after all. Is it gratitude for what we take advantage of on a daily basis? A circle of eco-Buddhists in a sunny park on a weekday evening, holding hands, thanking the world for health, awareness, longevity, and parking spots. Sharing cooked lentils, baked flaxseed cookies, chickpea-flour pasta, cooled to lukewarm by the bike trip to the park. Cold hands as the evening descends. Offering food to the man who “just moved to the neighbourhood” with the old t-shirt, torn jeans he wears, and greasy hair, asking for a bit of food from the abundance before him on the picnic table potluck.
One hundred millimeters of water is what it takes to remember. To be awed by how this used to be the norm. How other countries live without electricity on a daily basis. But they’re used to it; they’ve adjusted. Our lives are shocked by the yanking of what we know. We reach for light switches that flick on to yet more darkness. The toilet still works, a small miracle, like the car that will continue until the gas runs out and needs to be re-filled by hand instead of gas station pump. What did we have to do today, again? Habits – the body may remember, but the mind forgets.
It will, inevitably, come back. The power. The heat. Be grateful it’s not winter and there is no alternative source of heat. Be sorry there are no marshmallows. Maybe there are, to be roasted over the camping stove most recently used for the last camping trip of the season.
Before it returns – one more conversation, one more glass of red wine, one more memory slipping quickly away while the body holds fast.
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