We had a snow day here in Williamson County last week. The whole snow-thing is still a novelty to my family, so the kids played in it and we took pictures with great enthusiasm. Funny thing is that it also snowed in New Orleans around the same time, so all of our friends were sending us pictures of their snow angels and newly whitened lawns.
On days with weather such as we had last week I recall an event from my youth. I believe it was January 1982, which meant I was in the ninth grade. My mother and I lived on a corner lot in a quiet neighborhood; we had a large beautiful live oak tree with sprawling limbs and roots and an ivy covered trunk four to five feet in diameter. We loved that tree; Mr. Carter from down the street did not, living as he did with the foreknowledge that one day something would happen to that tree and it would take down the power and telephone lines that passed through the limbs, as such lines are want to do through such live oak limbs in Louisiana.
As my mother recalls, there was nothing as dramatic as a snow or ice storm. Rather, we were in midst of a January rainy spell when the temperatures dropped quickly one night and froze all those things that had soaked up the past few days drenching. Our dear oak tree, limbs heavy from the now frozen water and perhaps shocked from the cold, split open, causing one of its larger limbs to swing to the ground, thus taking down the power lines that passed through the limbs, as such lines are want to do through live oak limbs in Louisiana.
We woke to realize the damage and the fact our lights didn’t respond as usual when we flipped up the switches. I don’t recall how we noticed it, or that there was any special reaction from the heavens when we did notice, but at some point we observed that the refrigerator was still working. Further investigation revealed that the electrical outlet next to the fridge was also functional. The rest of the house was without juice, as was, we presumed at the time, the rest of the street.
The house was equipped with an electric heating system; however, we had a room at the rear of the house (“the sewing room”) that had a gas heater built-in to the wall. We recovered one of those fifty foot orange extension cords from the garage and strung it from the kitchen to the sewing room. We lived in the sewing room for three days. I remember that the first two days were nifty, but the bloom had fallen from the rose by day three.
We had sleeping bags back there, and I think we may have moved some of the living room furniture into our little home-within-a-home. I don’t remember moving the television in there—with its three channels and black-and-white picture, I doubt we considered it worth the trouble. We did, however, move the record player into our little room, and I remember listening to this one Roger Miller greatest hits record a lot. We probably gave a workout to a Glen Campbell record and two Elvis records (all on vinyl, of course).
Mr. Carter came by once, on the first day. When we saw it was him standing at the backdoor, I unplugged the orange cord and carried it with me back into the sewing room where I stayed while mom stood with him in the doorway. Although he reported to us that power was out in every house on our street of the block, he wasn’t too mad, warmed as he was by the satisfaction that he had cautioned that this would happen.
The irony of the whole thing certainly wasn’t lost on us--our neighbors without power and us with a working fridge and a place to plug in the record player. But we didn’t feel guilty in the least, figuring that similar situations had broken against us before, and would certainly do so again.
******************************
What I’m Listening To Now: The Black Keys, Attack and Release, on Rhapsody.
What I’m Reading Now: Glimmer Train, Issue 69 Winter 2009.
On days with weather such as we had last week I recall an event from my youth. I believe it was January 1982, which meant I was in the ninth grade. My mother and I lived on a corner lot in a quiet neighborhood; we had a large beautiful live oak tree with sprawling limbs and roots and an ivy covered trunk four to five feet in diameter. We loved that tree; Mr. Carter from down the street did not, living as he did with the foreknowledge that one day something would happen to that tree and it would take down the power and telephone lines that passed through the limbs, as such lines are want to do through such live oak limbs in Louisiana.
As my mother recalls, there was nothing as dramatic as a snow or ice storm. Rather, we were in midst of a January rainy spell when the temperatures dropped quickly one night and froze all those things that had soaked up the past few days drenching. Our dear oak tree, limbs heavy from the now frozen water and perhaps shocked from the cold, split open, causing one of its larger limbs to swing to the ground, thus taking down the power lines that passed through the limbs, as such lines are want to do through live oak limbs in Louisiana.
We woke to realize the damage and the fact our lights didn’t respond as usual when we flipped up the switches. I don’t recall how we noticed it, or that there was any special reaction from the heavens when we did notice, but at some point we observed that the refrigerator was still working. Further investigation revealed that the electrical outlet next to the fridge was also functional. The rest of the house was without juice, as was, we presumed at the time, the rest of the street.
The house was equipped with an electric heating system; however, we had a room at the rear of the house (“the sewing room”) that had a gas heater built-in to the wall. We recovered one of those fifty foot orange extension cords from the garage and strung it from the kitchen to the sewing room. We lived in the sewing room for three days. I remember that the first two days were nifty, but the bloom had fallen from the rose by day three.
We had sleeping bags back there, and I think we may have moved some of the living room furniture into our little home-within-a-home. I don’t remember moving the television in there—with its three channels and black-and-white picture, I doubt we considered it worth the trouble. We did, however, move the record player into our little room, and I remember listening to this one Roger Miller greatest hits record a lot. We probably gave a workout to a Glen Campbell record and two Elvis records (all on vinyl, of course).
Mr. Carter came by once, on the first day. When we saw it was him standing at the backdoor, I unplugged the orange cord and carried it with me back into the sewing room where I stayed while mom stood with him in the doorway. Although he reported to us that power was out in every house on our street of the block, he wasn’t too mad, warmed as he was by the satisfaction that he had cautioned that this would happen.
The irony of the whole thing certainly wasn’t lost on us--our neighbors without power and us with a working fridge and a place to plug in the record player. But we didn’t feel guilty in the least, figuring that similar situations had broken against us before, and would certainly do so again.
******************************
What I’m Listening To Now: The Black Keys, Attack and Release, on Rhapsody.
What I’m Reading Now: Glimmer Train, Issue 69 Winter 2009.
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