[Three candles and a laptop. Photo is mine.]

Don’t get me wrong…I love history. But I don’t necessarily need to live in history. I have no desire to travel to someplace in North Carolina to ditch my reading glasses, my jeans and my iPhone to reenact a minor battle in the Civil War. I have a great interest in the Civil War, and I think it’s a national shame that these precious and hallowed battle fields are being lost to development. But I don’t really need to dress up in a Union uniform and fire blanks at some bloke who is probably a lawyer in real life and and living with four children and a wife in Richmond who doesn’t really like wearing muslin.

That’s all very interesting, isn’t it? But that’s not the purpose of this post. No, my story is a bit different.

I’m writing this by candle light. Don’t ask why I have WiFi and hardly any electricity. I wish I could answer. But this may help:

Last night, Franklin Co. NY, (where I live) had a heavy rainstorm followed by a wind storm that was simply Shakespearean. The heaven’s howled and the trees swayed ominously, with a disconcerting roar. (And I mean roar). I’ve rarely head such sounds of fury. It kept me up from 4:30 am until late morning. I fell asleep simply out of exhaustion.

We had been trying to make decisions. We had no idea then this problem would be fixed, so should we just tough it out with six more fleece blankets on our bed? Should we light a fire in our fire-stove in the down-stairs room and sit until it was 85 degrees? We have a new tent…should we try winter camping in our front yard? We decided against that because of the number of blown-down trees. Should we plug our cell phones and go for an eleven hour drive, for the warmth and for the charged iPhones? Maybe Quebec City?

Upon waking and getting out of a warm bed into a chilly room, I counted eight trees that were blown down during the night. Not one fell on our car.

I also woke up to a power outage that started about 6:45 am. Here I am at nearly 10:00 pm sitting in a brown-out.

Writing this by three candles, I feel like Nathanial Hawthorn, or Washington Irving. They didn’t have electricity. But they weren’t writing blogs either. They were writing great American literature. By dim lights.

Isn’t that is what I’m doing?

Sort of?…..

[Our coffee table at black-out time. Photo is mine.]

[P.S. The full power just came on at 10:01 pm.]