Of Ice and Candlelight

You never really know your friends from your enemies until the ice breaks.

Inuit Proverb

We awoke this morning to an icy world; a beauty to behold but also one tinged with sadness because a number of trees bore the open wounds of broken limbs. One large branch succumbed to the weight of the ice and had thudded onto our roof, so Dad and I geared up and played lumberjacks all morning, sawing and hauling a great deal of wood to the backyard.

Then the lights went out. And, surprisingly, they stayed out. Usually a power outage lasts mere minutes. The rather uninformative information provided by the electric company on its website read that power would be restored by 4pm on Tuesday . . . 48 hours away.

So we ate a supper of cheese sandwiches by candlelight and snuggled under an extra layer of covers at 6:30pm for a long winter's night sleep.

Sometime around 7pm I awoke to the sound of the furnace's purr. Power had been restored. And with it the world of ice and candlelight has evaporated into a memory. Thankfully so.