Living in the Ozark hills can be challenging. The last couple of days have been a reality check for my novel.
Storms, especially big ones, can knock out the electricity in the rural areas. A derecho went by one year soaking the ground, snapping off trees and power poles. The power was off for almost a week. Intercounty Electric moved the lines up from the creek bed then so we’ve had little trouble with outages since.
Until yesterday.
Four inches of wet snow fell overnight. That’s not much. It did sit on wires, branches, everywhere. And the electric power went off about 8 a.m.
In the novel Mindy loses her electricity. I’d dredged through my memory to fill in details like having no water, a quiet house etc.
Another result is loss of the refrigerator. Here I’d goofed. I’d thought things inside would gather condensation as they began to warm. My surprise reality check showed they don’t. Instead, everything gradually goes from cold to cool to room temperature. I didn’t get into the freezers as I had a lot of frozen food and preferred it to stay frozen as long as possible.
Waiting
The day moved on. It’s a bit unsettling how dependent we’ve gotten on having electricity as we didn’t up north. No computer so no writing. No fans so no furnace letting the house slowly cool off.
We did have some heat. Living in the country with wooded property, we have a wood stove. A fan normally blows the heat out into the house, but convection air currents do that too, although more slowly.
As evening moved in, there were no lights and no movie. Cooking by candlelight is challenging. Evening time was spent reading by candlelight.
The electricity came back on a little before six the next morning. My reality check ended with the roar of furnace fans and refrigerator hum.
