In the Dark

The sound of my dogs panting and intermittent bouts of thunder, but nothing else.  No fans or stereos.  No ice maker or whirring dishwasher.  Not even the faint buzz of overhead lighting.  I never noticed before, but candles flicker silently.

A storm has taken out my electricity.  I put my one-year-old in bed and found candles and flashlights in time before the sky and all the houses I can usually see went completely dark.  This is the makings of either a very scary movie or some sort of personal awakening.  I am so used to electricity, so used to instant sound and light, my espresso machine if I want to do some work or the television if I want to turn off my brain.  Now I’m buzzing with all the electricity that isn’t flowing through the house.  

It’s only eight ‘o clock—plenty of time to see what it would have been like to write a couple hundred years ago.  Minus the laptop that still has some juice in its battery.  And the Ben and Jerry’s, which I salvaged from the dark freezer.  But the lack of wifi, the glass of red wine and candlelight—surely this is the stuff of writing years ago in its most romantic sense.  Forget the mastiff licking ice cream off my hip.  (It’s dark, remember?)