It has been decades since my husband and I decamped from Metropolis and moved to the country, which means one thing: We’ve had our fair share of power outages. In 1996, just three months into owning our first home, the power went out in a freak snowstorm that kept us in the dark for 11 days. We were younger then is about all I can say about how we got through it. Fortunately, that one snowstorm is still the record holder; most of our power outages since then have been no more than a few days (which is still plenty). With the exception of the freaky August 2003 power outage that knocked out electricity for 55 million people in the Northeast, all of our blackouts have been in the winter and, for the most part, we were prepared.
Recently, on a beautiful, calm Saturday morning, just as we started to make breakfast and tucked the bacon into the oven, we heard a huge crash outside the house and saw a flash of light. Then, the radio suddenly went off (the only immediate evidence on a sunny day that we had lost power). When I looked out the window, I could see the power lines dancing on the poles in front of the house, and then I spotted the tree limb in the street. One of the old maples near the road must have pulled down a line.
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