The Snow Moon is full today at 8:53am, so when it rises tonight it will be closest to full. This happens at about 5:30pm here in my part of the world, with sunset about fifteen minutes before moonrise. Just after sunset, Mars will be near the moon in the east; Jupiter will be overhead; and following the sun into the west is Venus. All three are astonishingly bright right now. They say Venus will cast a shadow in very dark places. I don’t think that will be possible tonight with the full moon, but perhaps later this week as the Snow Moon wanes and rises later in the evening. Venus is heading for its conjunction with the Sun next month, so these are the last few days of seeing the Evening Star.
Today is also Old St Bride’s Day. If you live in Scotland or follow a Scottish tradition, this is probably when you celebrate St Brigid’s Day, or Imbolg. The folks who resisted changing the calendar in the 18th century do have a point. February 1st is just too early in the seasonal year to think about winter’s end. Today feels more like Imbolg, this year all the more so. Tonight the Snow Moon is full. After tonight it will dwindle. In just two weeks, the Sap Moon is new. Already, maple buds are swelling.
I must keep hold of that thought. Because the weather out there is nothing like Spring… but Winter’s end really is just around the corner.
And now for a sort of doomy Full Moon Tale for the Snow Moon…
Snow
The shale was weak. All these sudden fluctuations between temperature extremes and the resultant expansion and contraction of freezing and thawing had separated the bedding layers into stacked folia that were only maintaining the hill’s shape through gravity. The problem was that some of these layers were inclined, more vertical than horizontal, and gravity wasn’t doing them much good. When the old oak on the edge of the escarpment finally toppled, it knocked one of these vertical layers loose. It must be said that the oak had done its best to break apart mineral bonds, creating many of the fissures that channeled water deep into the hillside. The tree had been fracturing that rock for centuries and this was its final salvo. We are unsure if this was its goal.
As the tree fell under the untenable weight of snow and ice, it ripped apart soil and snow and boulders and sent them all careening down the ridge. But it was the tree’s trunk that finally tipped the almost vertical slab of black shale out of balance. There was a moment when it all stood teetering on its thin edge, seemingly undecided on which way it should fall. But then the whole towering mass — hillside, tree, rock, soil and snow — toppled downslope, crashing onto the one of the large transformer stations that regulated the flow of power in the suburbs to the northwest of Boston. Sparks flew up into the night and the emergency generator fuel tanks caught fire, blowing up the whole station. We are unsure why it was considered wise to place this station at the foot of a crumbling hill.
The last act of the AI controller on the transformer station, following its prime directive to keep the power flowing, was to switch all capacity to three other main stations, sending a surge throughout the entire system. This happened at night when thousands of heat pumps, baseboard heating systems, furnace blowers, and charging stations had the system running at near peak capacity. Surge protection failed in two of the other stations and they blew up. The third station tried to meet the surging needs of the grid but was forced to shut down after about forty-five minutes. Nobody was injured at the transfer stations, but there was catastrophic grid failure throughout the region. We are unsure if the AI counts as a fatality.
The powerful atmospheric river that had dumped precipitation across an entire continent was supposed to bring rain. It was projected to miss the Great Lakes, so that there would be no watery recharge and the rain would be heavy but not calamitous. Neither of these things turned out to be true. Instead, the storm held its course, heading straight across the US-Canadian border, picking up tons of water and mixing with frigid air from a wobbly polar vortex dipping down over Lake Michigan where it was nudged slightly south by the polar flow. By the time forecasters realized their models were wrong, it was bedtime on a weeknight and nobody heard their increasingly shrill warnings. Those who did hear paid them no mind. There were so many warnings. There had been frantic handwringing about a couple storm cells passing back to back only a few days earlier. That these storms had actually dumped a good deal of snow on the region was apparently immaterial. There were just too many warnings to heed. And it must be said that there were also many calamities that came without warning. Warning, it seemed, was broken. We are quite sure this had ramifications for the unfolding disaster…
Lydia jerked awake. For a few seconds she wondered what had happened to drag her from sleep. A loud noise? A dangerous smell? The cat? The kids! She sat up in panic. But as she rebuilt her reality, she noticed instead a lack, a silence, an uncanny absence. The usual hum of connectivity was gone. The red power lights were all dark. The clock radio was black. There was no glow from the neighbor’s street lamp. Ah! the storm-not-a-storm had arrived. Fumbling for her phone, she discovered that it had died in the night, as it was wont to do. So, groaning, she pulled off her deep layer of blankets, pulled on her shearling slippers, and set out to investigate.
Power failures were frequent in New England. A fallen branch, an icy windstorm, a drunk driver could all bring down power lines. Usually this resolved itself within hours though there was a worrying trend toward longer and longer repair periods after each break. A mudslide in the last flood had left her house without power for six days. Six days is a long time with a bored pair of five-year-old twins.
Lydia shuffled quietly into their room. Seb was sprawled across his bunk width-wise, completely uncovered, and snoring stentoriously. Rina’s small form was curled under her comforter, with only a fuzz of black hair poking out near the pillow. Finding nothing amiss, Lydia headed for the stairs.
The darkness was deep but not especially troublesome. Lydia had grown up in this house. During her divorce, Lydia had moved in with her parents. The twins were toddling infants at the time, and she had few ties to the place where her marriage had failed. So it seemed a good idea to pause, to take a bit of time to regroup, get her bearings. It was, of course, supposed to be temporary. But then came COVID and cancer; and, in a very short time, she found herself alone with her children in the old Georgian manse that had sheltered her throughout childhood.
She couldn’t afford to buy another house anyway. Her low six figure income, divorced as it was from Gerry’s much higher salary, was insufficient to pay the mortgage on their home, and she’d never be able to come up with a down payment for anything else. She could have rented a condo like Gerry did. But even as a renter, she couldn’t afford anything less than an hour commute. Away from home. Away from day care. Away from anyone she knew. There was no way that would work. She would spend as much time driving as with her kids each day.
When they told her that she had to return to the Boston office — though she had been doing quite a commendable job for two years remotely — she did the math and decided to call it quits. She rolled her severance package into paying off the last of the mortgage on her parent’s house and found a closer, albeit less financially rewarding, job that paid their minimal bills. Then she and the kids settled in.
It felt faintly sybaritic with just the three of them in the huge house. She’d never noticed that as a child. But then, maybe that was because there were still inaccessible spaces when she was a kid, spaces that hadn’t been rehabilitated until after she’d grown. Her parents bought the moldering house in the hippy 1970s, and bringing it back to life was the work of a lifetime. Her mother beat back the encroaching bog and created a teaching garden, field trips for generations of her students. But the house belonged to Papa. A civil engineer from Nuevo León, he was never happy unless he had something broken in his hands, something he could fix, something worth fixing. He always said the house had good bones, even as he was gleefully cursing the fieldstone foundation and the 1940s wiring.
She thought about finishing up the ell and renting it out, but she didn’t think she had that kind of money. Definitely not the skills. While she was in between jobs and grieving everything, she had managed to clear out decades of detritus and slap paint on wood and plaster, but that was the extent of her renovation capacity. And making that space rentable would be a major undertaking.
The old addition was hardly more than storage space that had once connected the house to the long-demolished barn. It had no internal wiring and a closet bathroom with no shower and a pit toilet. The porcelain sink basin with its iron pump spigot was romantic in its way, but she doubted anyone would want to use it. She didn’t. Lydia’s mother had turned some of the space into a conservatory and three-season room that was actually comfortable for perhaps May and September. It was too hot in the summer afternoons and so cold in the winter that she had to bring her beloved aloe plants into the kitchen for fear of losing them to frost. So it wasn’t much of a conservatory. Not even for plants, never mind renters.
But if she was honest with herself, despite the chronic housing shortages everywhere, she didn’t put much effort into the idea of renting. She wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sharing part of her home with a stranger. She had two small children, and that felt a bit naively trusting.
Standing in her pajamas looking out at the storm raging in the darkness, Lydia felt her first premonition that this one might be trouble. The arborvitae hedge along the road was nearly invisible, but she could just make out tree shapes bent double in the wind. Snow was piling up on the porch and she doubted she would be able to open the front door, one of many reasons that door was rarely used. She couldn’t be sure with the lack of light, but she thought she saw glints of ice on the porch railing — which explained the power outage. All it took was one frozen limb falling on the power lines and the whole town would go dark.
She wandered back into the family room where the wood stove was quietly ticking in a self-satisfied manner, radiating competency and comfort and security. There was nothing to be done. She wasn’t even sure what time it was, though she thought it couldn’t be too far from dawn. She loaded the stove with wood and then decided to fill up the one in the kitchen as well.
It was a quirk of this old house that the refrigerator had been installed alongside the original ice chest in the unheated pantry between the kitchen and the garage, far from the wood cook stove. It was somewhat annoying, ergonomically, but the benefit was that the fridge would stay cold in winter power failures for quite a while, even if she opened the door once or twice. So she retrieved the morning’s oatmeal from the fridge, where it had been slowly hydrating overnight, and she set the pan on the wood stove to warm. She would fire up the generator when it was light enough to see. For now, she might as well go back to bed.
Wrapped in her blanket cave again, she drifted off to sleep, listening to the silence inside and the storm outside, hoping fervently that school would be canceled in the morning.
Gerry woke up to darkness, right on time as usual. He took pride in never requiring an alarm clock to start his day. He just woke up when he needed to, even when he needed to be up early — as was the case this morning. He had a breakfast board meeting downtown at 8am, which meant that he had to be in the board room by 7:30 to ensure that all the old geezers were properly accommodated. The drive between his condo and downtown Boston took a bit over an hour in morning traffic — on a good day. From the bleating meteorologists on the 10pm news, Gerry gathered that today was not likely to be a good day. Why couldn’t Massholes learn to drive in bad weather?
Madeleine snorted and rolled over as Gerry sat up. Without fully waking, she grabbed the comforter and pulled it over her face. Gerry shook his head and reached for his phone to check his messages. There was nothing from his business account, which was odd, but his mother had sent his personal account a plea for help with some technical thing. No amount of reasoned argument would persuade her that he had no idea what she was talking about most of the time. He had taken to putting her on speaker and doing internet searches and then parroting the advice he found. He would address this later, probably much later, as his mother lived several times zones away in Denver.
Gerry stood and stretched. Without the blanket wrapped around his midsection, he noticed the cold for the first time. He shuffled out of the room, quietly closing the bedroom door behind him, and flipped the hall light switch. Nothing happened. And it was even colder in the hallway.
Using his phone as a flashlight, he padded down the stairs, heading for the thermostat, working up to a good grumble. He tried to turn on the kitchenette lights. Still nothing. And the clocks on the coffee maker, microwave and oven were all dark. Great. He shone his phone on the thermostat and discovered that it was 51°F in the condo. Turning up the temperature setting did not switch on the heat, as he knew it wouldn’t… just trying anyway.
Mentally adding a coffee stop to his morning commute, he headed back upstairs to shower. There was a bit of hot water left in the water heater, but his brief shower was no more than tepid. He needed to shave, but he wasn’t sure how to do that without light. He ended up balancing his phone on the glass ledge above the sink, shining the light upwards, mostly into his eyes. When he had finished one side of his face, there came a gurgle from the tap and the water pressure dropped to nothing. He reached over and flushed the toilet, realizing his mistake the second after he pushed the lever. The bowl emptied out and nothing flowed back in. Great. Just fucking great.
When he was looking for a place to live that didn’t feel like Lydia, he had settled on this condo because the rent was not too bad for two bedrooms and two bathrooms, which was necessary for child visitation weekends — particularly since Madeleine moved in almost before he had finished arranging the furniture. But mostly he chose this place because it had sharp modern lines and full carpeting and stainless steel appliances that glowed with disuse. It was the opposite of Lydia and her shabby chic, country rustic aesthetic where every last thing had a story and a practical use and a thick coat of patina.
Living in a rented place also sounded like a great idea. Let someone else tackle the endless stream of maintenance and repairs. No more yard work. No more painting. No more shoveling snow. No more replacing shakes after the chipmunks chewed holes into the exterior walls. Probably no more chipmunks, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He did ask about heat and electricity. He’d lived through enough New England winters to appreciate having some measure of grid independence. Because the grid was flaky as hell. If you sneezed too near the power lines, the whole thing went down. The realtor had assured him that the complex had that all worked out. In hindsight, she was suspiciously vague on the details. He should have asked more questions. But he wanted the place, wanted to be done with limbo living in the house where his life had fallen apart, and he just assumed she meant that the complex had a generator or some such normal and reasonable back-up power system.
Turned out that the emergency back-up was a deal with the power company to be first in line for service. Which meant squat. If the power went out, it could be an hour or more before the power company even found out about it. If it happened at night, nobody would call in the outage until dawn. By the time the first phone calls were made, the heating system would have been down for hours. Water heaters were cooling in garage utility rooms. The pump on the complex well would be dead, with water pipes gradually draining out with each predawn bathroom flush. And there was no light or coffee.
On the other hand, he did not have to worry about a fridge full of food going bad. That was also something he left behind in Lydia time. He and Madeleine hardly ate at home. There was probably some cheese and ice cream and Mad’s almond milk. Did almond milk go bad? He wasn’t sure. But he also wasn’t concerned.
He packed his bag, grabbed his coat and keys, and went down to the garage — where he remembered that there was no power just as he pushed the door opener. Growling, he tossed his stuff into the Range Rover and faced down the door. The garage on his condo was a two-car, and the door was wide and heavy. There were also no good hand holds on the inside. He had to use the lock which was thin and flimsy and too narrow for his hand, never mind both hands. It was cold in the garage, but he started to sweat as he strained against the garage door, which did not so much as budge. Finally, he gave up and went back into the house to go out the front door, thinking that maybe it would be easier from the outside where at least there was a handle.
He opened the door… and stood there immobilized by the storm, trying to get his bearings. The portico had kept most of the snow away from the front door, but the snow was two feet deep just beyond the front stoop. There was no light outside and the storm was still raging, so he could barely see the driveway. But he reckoned that the snow was packed up against the garage door. Maybe even ice, sealing it shut. Swearing loudly now, he went back inside, pulled his boots out of the hall closet and found the snow shovel where he had abandoned it after moving in — by the washing machine. He wasn’t sure why there.
After twenty minutes of work and a thorough soaking both from sweat and snow, Gerry had managed to clear a path to the garage door as well as a narrow strip of the driveway that would probably accommodate Madeleine’s Tesla, if she could get it started, which he was trying not to think too much about. (Nor that she would be waking up to a cold apartment without water…) He didn’t bother clearing much of a path for the Range Rover. That’s why he had a Range Rover. To drive over this shit. He then removed the drift that had blown against the garage door and broke up the ice under the weather stripping. A few more minutes of struggling finally got the door open.
As he sat in the Range Rover, waiting for the car to warm up enough to thaw his hands — why didn’t he have gloves! — he almost considered calling off the board meeting. Regrettably, he could not just call out. He was the CEO. But surely they could reschedule. It’s not like the old farts should be out in this weather anyway.
But they would be. And they would all get those patronizing New England smirks when he let a little thing like bad weather throw off the schedule. And he needed them to say yes today.
He put the car in gear and backed into the storm.
He remembered that he needed to close the garage door by hand when he pushed the button on his key fob and nothing happened. Of course.
Fortunately, he had not taken off his boots.
Unfortunately, his shoes were still in the house.
He was beyond caring.
Later in the morning, after the sun rose somewhere above the storm, Lydia woke to the bubbling voices of her kids. They had discovered the snow and quickly deduced that there would be no school today.
“Mommy! It’s dark!” yelled Sebastian. With Seb everything was full volume or nothing. (And the nothing was more alarming…)
Sabrina, the elder by ten minutes, was the more practical and sedate personality. “Did you ‘member to start the gen’rater, Mommy?” she asked, while rubbing her eyes and trying to stifle a yawn.
“No, love,” replied Lydia, “I’m still in bed. You just woke me up. So, of course, now I will go start the generator.”
“Mommy! There’s snow! Did you see the snow? There won’t be school, right Mom? Not in the snow, right?” Sebastian’s enthusiasm followed her down the stairs and out to the side porch where the generator was partially buried under a drift. Lydia confirmed that there would be no school, and please go inside, you’re not wearing shoes, before shooing Seb back into the house, grabbing a broom and clearing off the generator. It took a couple tries. It always took a couple tries. And every time it failed to come on that first time, her heart stuttered a little bit. But then it fired up, growling out its displeasure. She made sure the tank was full and went back inside, throwing the house switch as she went past.
Not everything was on the generator circuit. She couldn’t do laundry in a storm, and most of the outlets remained dead. There would be no television or computer time today, and nearly all the clocks would need to be reset when the power came back on. But the fridge was humming contentedly as she walked past it; the furnace blower could run again, though it wasn’t needed with the wood stoves; and, crucially, the well pump and hot water heater were both back on. Not for the first time she wondered what it would take to have an artesian well. She used to think that was how wells were supposed to work, once upon a time. But she was probably mistaken on that. There were all those folk tales that involved wells and buckets and endless sloshing between the town square and the kitchen, after all.
Lydia pulled the oatmeal off the wood cookstove and put the teakettle on. The twins were in the front room amiably debating something. They each had their own ideas. They disagreed as often as not, but they rarely argued and they hardly ever fought. There was also always more said than what Lydia could hear. They talked in some medium that was inaccessible to anyone but themselves. Twin-speak, pop-psychologists called it, but from what Lydia could see, it wasn’t so much speaking as having direct access to thought. Lydia was an only child, so she had no direct experience, but she thought most siblings were far more combative than her children. She supposed that was the benefit of twins.
The disadvantage was that everything happened for both of them at once.
Seb burst into the kitchen, Rina trailing behind.
“Rina says the snow is taller than me,” announced Seb.
“It might be,” agreed Lydia.
“Will I drown if I go out in it?”
“I don’t think so. You’d have to breathe in a lot of snow.”
Seb considered that. “Well, what if I wear my Spidey mask?”
“That might work,” she replied thoughtfully. Then she changed the subject before he decided to go test the mask against the storm. “But hey, it’s a snow day, guys. You know what that means?”
There was only half a second pause before they shrieked in unison “Snow day cupboard!”
“Yep! What are we going to do today?”
“Games!” yelled Seb as Rina said “Knitting!” Then they both shouted, “Gingerbread!”
Lydia’s mother had been an elementary school teacher and had instituted the snow day cupboard. Growing up, there had been craft supplies and board games and recipes and a pile of read-aloud books that only came out when Lydia was confined to the house. It wasn’t always a snow day. Sometimes it was a rainy day or a sick day. Sometimes it was merely a day to hide. But it made confinement fun. Lydia loved it as a child, even into her teen years when there were many days that she just wanted to hide. But as a parent, she thought it was downright brilliant. Every time she opened the snow day cupboard, she missed her mother and wished she had said thank you more often.
The kettle began to whistle and she instructed her kids to set the table. They had a leisurely breakfast and then opened up the cupboard.
Gerry was swearing prodigiously and fluently. Where were the plows? Why was everybody so slow? Why was every damn traffic light broken? What was that guy even thinking driving a Lexus out in this? And why the hell is everything closed!
He still had no coffee. His hands were thawed, but still raw red and stinging after shoveling without gloves. The dashboard temperature gauge claimed it was 18°F out there. Felt more like twenty below. His pants were wet from the knee down, despite the boots. He hoped nobody would be looking at his feet. He wondered if there might be someplace downtown to buy shoes. Maybe another pair of pants too, though it appeared that the pants would be dry long before he got downtown at the rate traffic was crawling this morning. And it was definitely getting on to morning now. Sunrise was not far off. It had to be almost 7am by now. At this rate the old geezers would be gone to lunch before Gerry made it to the breakfast meeting.
He tried calling his office again. His assistant was still not answering. So he broke his own rule and called the man’s cell phone. It went straight to voice mail. Gerry fumed… but then he thought about that. It was very unlike Darren to not have his phone in hand, or at least in his pocket. And he would never just ignore Gerry’s number. So Gerry dialed Madeleine. No answer. No voice mail either. Madeleine lived on her phone. Something was definitely wrong. Feeling desperate, Gerry dialed his mother. Again, no connection.
There were many places in Massachusetts where cell service was minimal. That did not normally mean no cell service. He might pay more, but Gerry could count on roaming to complete his calls. Now there were definitely no bars on his phone, but he was beginning to suspect that this was something else. He opened the glove box and pulled out the burner phone he kept in there (remnant of pre-divorce days). He flipped open the phone and dialed his cell. There was no ring. Eventually, he snapped the burner shut and tossed it into the passenger seat. Apparently, there was no phone.
Oddly, this is what triggered concern. Not the dark streetlights and shuttered Dunkin Donuts. Not the icy roads and the fallen trees. Not the zero visibility with snow flying vertically across the road and wind pushing his Range Rover toward the berm. Not the cars piled up and abandoned like fallen dominoes along the highway nor the even scarier completely empty stretches of road in town. Not even the debacle with the garage door. All that is manageable with the right tools and will. But a complete loss of connection… Gerry started to shiver. Where was he going?
At the next exit, he made a snap decision to get off the highway, find someplace with a landline, call the office. Maybe even call off the board meeting. It’s not like he would get there on time anyway. He was alarmed to discover that he hadn’t even made it as far as the I-495 ring around Boston. He trundled down some Main Street, one of those identical boroughs, looking for someplace open. He could hardly see beyond the road’s edge, but there were no lights to be seen. And soon enough he ran out of Main Street.
He should have just turned around. He knew he should have turned around. Massachusetts roads never did logical things like go in a straight line until you meet another road that goes in a perpendicular straight line. Massachusetts was tied in knots. It wanted you to get lost. Maybe by way of a good soak in the swamp. He knew this. He’d railed about it at least once a week since moving to this damned state almost twenty years ago. But he continued driving. By the time he found another road, he was not at all sure which direction he was facing. But he doggedly turned right anyway. Anywhere else in the world this was how you got back to where you started. But not in Massachusetts. (In fact, he was still driving away from the highway, deeper into the boggy countryside.)
The storm continued unabated. Trees were down everywhere. He passed power lines draped over fenceposts and crushed mailboxes. He saw a courier van turned on its side in the snow-filled ditch. He might have stopped, but, really what could he do? He didn’t even have gloves. Nor a phone.
Suddenly, there was a flash in his peripheral vision, followed by a loud crack. He swerved instinctually.
The gingerbread project had gone on long enough. Lydia feared that she’d never get all the icing out of the cracks between floorboards; and Eugene, her mother’s fat Coon cat (the last in a long line of nominally rodent-controlling, semi-feral shelter cats), had globs of dough in his fur, the cleaning of which would probably lead to serious lacerations. In any case, it was time to face the snow. She hadn’t heard much noise from outside for a while. The storm was losing strength.
They all donned boots and gloves and hats — and one Spidey mask — and piled onto the side porch. Lydia checked the generator again and then grabbed the snow shovel. The kids each had plastic spades in day-glow colors. Lydia bought them at the Ace Hardware. She was not sure what these things were supposed to be used for. Too big for sand, too flimsy for the garden. But they worked great for snow.
They cleared the usual pathways. To the woodpile. To the compost pile. Around to the front of the garage and then most of the driveway. They didn’t bother with the front door, but they dug out the mailbox by the end of the drive in the unlikely event that there would be delivery. The town’s plow trucks must have come through at least once because there was a road-shaped indentation in the snow. There were no tire tracks.
After they finished the mailbox, they all stood staring at the smooth expanse of snow on the road and across the street to their nearest neighbors. The Rileys had moved in with COVID. They were just about retirement age, so they took it. They bought an exurban house and left the contagion behind… they thought… turns out there was no leaving the contagion behind, and they just ended up with a late-life mortgage in a town they didn’t know. Lydia felt sorry for them. But the twins adored them. Mickey and Daphne Riley were flaky, childless boomers, as crunchy as they come. So… they were sort of like large-ish children themselves. Mickey taught the kids how to play disc golf, and Daphne gave them free rein on her piano.
By New England standards, the Rileys lived in a new house. Which meant it was built sometime in the late 20th century. It had high ceilings, an open floor plan, and an abundance of shiny appliances. It did not have a generator. Lydia schooled them on that need. It also originally did not have wood heat. The Rileys thought their carbon-free heat exchanger was vastly superior — until their first winter power outage. They spent a week in Lydia’s guest room and came home to burst pipes in the basement. They couldn’t afford to put in a chimney, but they had installed a wood stove in their living room. It didn’t do much good for the basement — they ran an electric heater off the generator for that — nor did it feel very warm anywhere in the house since all the heat pooled near the ceiling. But at least they didn’t freeze.
Lydia wondered how many people might be freezing right now. How many people were closing their eyes and letting the floating cold take them away forever. She involuntarily reached for her children.
“Hey, guys, how ‘bout we take the gingerbread to the Rileys?”
“Yeah!”
So they packed up the gingerbread, shouldered their shovels (because it didn’t look plowed much over there) and went for a neighborly visit. The storm had all but stopped and the flakes were falling gently now. As the sun was westering, light broke through and made magic with the ice and snow.
If only every day could be a snow day, she thought… this is when we’re really living…
The electricity came on abruptly in the middle of the night. Lydia startled awake as several electronic beeps and whistles signaled their newfound power. Lydia’s phone was still dead.
She decided to plug it in and let it charge. She had to get up anyway to shut off the generator… though… it would be so nice to stay warm in bed and just let it run until morning. But no, that would burn through the entire gas can. So she waddled downstairs, flipped the switch, and braved the cold to turn off the machine. She even brought in an armful of wood.
Feeling smug, but cold, she climbed the stairs already half asleep again. But before she could get in bed, her phone started buzzing.
She picked it up and stared at the number in trepidation… Madeleine…
For the first time since the storm began, Lydia felt powerless…
Eversource is reporting an estimated 200,000 customers remain without electricity after Winter Storm Kali knocked out power to dozens of communities in the Boston metro area. Fatalities from the storm are currently estimated to be 147 people, nearly half of whom died when an assisted living center in Newton lost power for over 36 hours. Fatal traffic accidents were reported throughout the region. At least one man was killed when a transmission pole snapped and brought down live wires on his car. Reportedly, he was trying to get to work.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 