Just for balance, let’s start with one of the not-so-nice things: when you have well water, like us, no electricity means no water, because it’s pumped out of the ground via electric pump.
You can imagine how that goes. No bathing, no washing, no cooking, no flushing toilets. No water means your house is basically just a giant tent. A deluxe one, but still.
So when our electric went out during the nutso midwest windstorms, we found ourselves camping.
It wasn’t all bad, though. For one thing, my in-laws were gracious enough to let us move in with them when we tired of our wilderness experience. They were happy to have us (or at least acted that way quite convincingly). They watched our kids and our dog, and fed us. My mother-in-law even gave us clean towels every day, just like a luxury hotel.
Seeing our community come together was a pretty amazing thing also. A giant tree fell across our street just past our house, blocking the residents at the end from coming or going. The storm had barely even stopped before everyone in the neighborhood (hubs included) was out with his chainsaw, cutting the trunk into manageable chunks.
Our neighbor has a generator, and so kept our freezer items in his freezer, keeping them from spoiling. In turn, hubs cleared that same neighbor’s lawn of fallen branches and leaves. People and businesses all over town put up signs thanking AEP for restoring power.
We had a fairly tall tree fall down in our back yard, but out of that, we got some firewood (for when our electric goes out this winter of course) and some cute new stepping stones.
All in all, when you have a nice family and a nice community, losing power for 8 days isn’t so bad. (9 might have pushed me over the edge.)
