Hello friends,
So many of you reached out after the last essay, and I appreciate that. Ian was meant to make direct landfall over my county, which hasn’t happened since 1921. Instead, like so many hurricanes before it, Ian turned at the last minute. The Ft. Myers area took the brunt of the storm’s damage. Once again, Pinellas County avoided the worst. We were fortunate.
Although we barely got rain, the wind took out the power for more than two million Floridians, myself included. As soon as I hit publish on The Waiting Game, my electricity shut off. I kid you not. The sky outside was not yet black, but it was dark enough. I lit all the candles and knew I’d be going to bed early that night.
Losing power during a storm is like going back in time. You become connected to your surroundings and yourself. Not even hiking a trail in the middle of nowhere compares. When you go out in nature, you choose to leave technology and electricity behind. That safety blanket remains, though. You can always go back. In a hurricane, there’s nowhere to go. Your home becomes a shell. No air conditioning or fans. No hot showers. No fridge or stove or coffee pot. No internet.
I remembered I had the new Dune movie in the cloud. I used my phone as a hotspot to download the film to my computer, which I made sure to charge earlier. The candlelight matched the color of the desert. The flames threw up shadows to mirror the great sandworms. When the movie ended, I watched the shadows dance on the walls as the darkness and wind pushed against the house. I brought a candle to my room to get ready for bed, and I fell asleep to the sounds of the retreating wind.
I often get out of bed to pee in the middle of the night. Losing power doesn’t change that part of my routine all that much. Usually, I don’t put my glasses on or turn on the bathroom light. This is primarily a semi-conscious decision. My eyes are barely open anyway. But something about not being able to see makes the dark both more and less immersive. Nothing is defined. All the grays of the night blur together. When I can’t see, I’m part of the dark, just another shadow lurking around the corner. The other night creatures lose their teeth when I can’t tell them from my bathroom sink. Cold metal handles. Room temperature water. Soap that smells like my grandpa. I see the shapes move in the mirror, but I can’t distinguish which are me and which exist around me. There’s nothing the be afraid of when I am just another thing that goes bump in the night.
A beautiful fall day greeted me when I woke up the next morning. A bit of wind remained, but the sky was blue and sunny. The temperature dropped into the low 70s, so I threw open the doors and windows. The neighbors had already started cleaning up debris, but I decided to sit on the porch and enjoy the weather for a bit. The weatherman wasn’t lying when he said Ian would set us up for a beautiful weekend.
Thankfully, the incredible electric workers got our power back by Friday afternoon. They always amaze me after a storm. Out-of-state workers join their Floridian counterparts in hopping from outage to outage. They work around the clock to bring some sense of normalcy back to us. It feels corny to call them heroes, but that’s what they are. They bring us out of the cave and back into the twenty-first century. If anyone reading this is an electric worker, thank you.
Until next time,
Yardena
Weekend Potpourri
I wrote last week’s essay for the Soaring Twenties Social Club’s monthly Symposium. September’s theme was The Beach. I highly encourage you to peruse the other entries from this incredible group of artists.
If Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Was About Leonardo Dicaprio’s Girlfriends
I’m genuinely astounded that Gen Z never learned to read cursive
This girl is my hero
Thanks for the thoughtful and evocative post. I especially appreciate the idea of being “part of the dark.”
I'm glad to read this sequel to what happened, to capture the feeling inspired at the moment the power failed right after you hit "send" on your last posting, but not quite gone, thanks to some deft pre-downloading and charging for a great film, and to be reminded of other senses coming alive in the middle of the night.