73 Hours of Being Amish

“Noooooooo!” we all screamed at the same time.

Well, almost all of us. Nate had just scarfed some bacon and darted out the door to his friend’s house. And Tighe was on the phone in his office—presumably a professional work call—so he also did not join in our verbal anguish in the living room.

But for Tess, Sam, Lou, and I, the despair, the frustration, and the torment were quite acute. Enough to make us scream in unison. And I usually enforce a pretty strict Cone of Silence when Tighe’s on the phone.

Why, you ask?

Not because of the death of a loved one.

Not because a burglar had broken in and was holding Lou hostage.

Not even because someone had finished the last of the Trader Joe’s s’mores ice cream—delicious by the way—and stuck the empty carton back in the freezer.

Nope. It was simply because an afternoon thunderstorm had decimated our power.

The lights flickered only once and then it was just dark.

I mean, it was 1pm, so it wasn’t that dark. But the sconces in the living room and the dining room chandelier had been on to compensate for the dreary, overcast day, and suddenly, they went dark.

Which doesn’t seem like a big deal under normal circumstances, but our power had just been restored after 73+ hours of living an Amish lifestyle. That’s three solid days.

It started with a particularly violent thunderstorm on Friday afternoon. I had been at the pool with Tess and Lou and Tess’s friend, chatting in the shallow end with a handful of mom friends, each with a White Claw in hand. It was a lovely start to the weekend.

But as the dark clouds loomed overhead and thunder and lightning neared closer, the lifeguards, doing their job for the first time all season, blew their whistles, closed the pool, and sent us home.

As we drove home, I contemplated a stop at the store for one item that I can’t even recall at the moment, but at the last moment, I decided to steer the car home. And it’s a good thing I did because shortly after we arrived, things outside began getting pretty dicey.

Wind. The kind that swirled the tops of the trees around like they were stalks of seaweed in a fast-moving river.

Intensely hard rain that formed rapid moving rivers in our backyard and down the hill of our driveway.

Loud claps of thunder that boomed overhead, startling the kids and then rolling around in the clouds above us without end.

And lightning that lit up the ominously black afternoon sky. It was only 4pm. In July. How did it suddenly get so dark so fast?

Small limbs and sticks and clusters of green leaves were ripped off the trees and hurled to the ground with force

Tess and Lou ran to hide in the basement while Tess’s friend clung to me, asking anxious, fretful questions about how long the storm would last, whether we were safe, and when she could go home.

Meanwhile the lights kept flickering, just for a second or two at first, then gradually longer and longer intervals until they just went out altogether. And with each flicker, Tighe’s frustrated groans from his first-floor office where he was trying to work, got louder. He has an array of computer monitors in there, each plugged into the wall. I don’t know what he does in there, but he’s pretty dedicated to it and without his beloved screens, he can’t do it.

I stayed calm at the dining room table and tried to alleviate Tess’s friend’s fears, assuring her that I’d drive her home when the storm passed. It got violent pretty fast and just as quickly, the wind and the thunder and lightning eased, leaving us with a persistent drizzle.

And then that was it.

I gathered Tess, Lou, and her friend into the car, and as we drove the seven blocks or so to the friend’s house, we saw the damage. Trees and limbs down everywhere, some blocking streets, some landing on rooftops and cars.

When we arrived at Tess’s friend’s house, where they were also without power, the dad met me at the front door.

“That was intense!” he said. “I bet it takes several days to restore power.”

I wished right then he would shut the hell up.

Because he was right.

And honestly, the first 36 hours or so weren’t so bad. Even though Tighe and I had to cancel our anniversary date night. Sixteen years. Here’s some more adversity from the universe to celebrate.

But it really was kinda fun at the beginning. The storms crushed the heatwave we’d been having, so sleeping with the windows open was downright pleasant. I even donned a sweatshirt in the mornings. Unsure of how long the whole thing would last, but also knowing that we were low on flashlights and fearful of candles, *insert link* we headed to Costco, where we bought 8 flashlights, a slew of batteries and headlamps, beef jerky, cashews, and pistachios. Which became our dinner that night.

The kids played cards, read books, and enjoyed their four-person slumber party in the thermodynamically cooled basement so much that they pledged to sleep there even after the AC kicks on again. They even asked if we can start a tradition of “electricity-free nights” once a week.

Fine. I can agree to that. No screens, dim lighting. Sounds nice. But I refuse to unplug our refrigerators those nights. Or the hot water heater. I get that cold plunges are good for your skin and your heart and all, but I prefer hot showers, even in summertime.

I also prefer my own homemade coffee. The cold brew cans I grabbed at the grocery store out of desperation didn’t cut it. They’re making my hands shaky, jittery. I think I’ve developed a heard palpitation.

But it was Tighe who was really struggling.

The uncertainty of the first 12 hours just made him anxious. He usually works 7 days a week, so to close up shop early on a Friday afternoon AND not be able to do anything on Saturday either caused a mild depression to set in.

I’m not exactly sure what he does for a living, but it seems to be trying to take over the world, one plumbing part at a time. He’s relentless.

Fortunately, he was able to distract himself with the large limb—really, it was half of the tree—from one of the maple trees in our backyard that had twisted off in the storm and landed on our neighbor’s roof. So, he busied himself by commiserating with our neighbor, visually assessing the damage, checking our homeowner’s policy, and calling local tree companies, all of whom worked overtime that weekend.

It wasn’t fun, but it kept him busy and made him feel industrious. And watching the tree guys extricate the limb from the roof without causing any additional damage or killing themselves in the process turned into a fun family event.

Our neighbors on either side have generators, the big fancy kind that we declined to install after a big ice storm a few years ago. After a few bids, we decided we’d skip the big investment and risk the damages. And this was the first time I regretted that decision. Anyway, those neighbors let us charge our devices and store some perishables in their fridge. Which was amazingly generous and helpful!

So many friends and neighbors ended up surrendering and heading to hotels, but we were still pretty comfortable at home.

On Saturday evening, officially 24 hours after reporting the outage to the energy company, we were one of the only neighborhoods in KC without power. So we went to mass to pray for it. Tighe was getting really antsy, not being able to work on his beloved screens in his office, so I think the meditative quiet at church helped ease his tension.

Until we got to Culver’s, where Tighe ordered a double cheeseburger with grilled onions. Delicious, right? With a chocolate milkshake and fries to really drown his sorrows.

Well, Sam’s friend, our storm refugee for the day, accidentally grabbed Tighe’s burger off the tray and took a bite before we realized the mistake.

It might have been Tighe’s straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back moment. Those plumbing parts he’s obsessed with were waiting for him somewhere in cyber space, and as his edginess bubbled over, he couldn’t even find solace in the double cheeseburger with grilled onions he’d been dreaming about.

But his anger explosion would take a backseat to the animated, excited chattiness of our kids, planning night two of their sleepover marathon. But first, they’d delight themselves with a refreshing cold shower. What a treat!

So Tighe’s tantrum was simply a string of muffled, sarcastic comments that they couldn’t even hear. Nothing was going to dampen the excitement of these future luddites!

After his ice-cold shower, Lou affixed his new headlamp to his head and bolted out the front door. I just happened to spot him out of the corner of my eye as I sorted towels in our master—er, primary—bedroom. I watched as he trotted down our sidewalk and turned left, past our driveway entrance.

“Lou!” I called through the screen when he’d gone just a bit too far. “Where are you going?”

“To say good night to our neighbor!”

“Oh,” I replied, pausing to take that in. “Why?”

“Because I love him!”

“Okay.”

I guess that makes sense.

Our neighbor, half of a married couple with five adult children, reported the rest of the story to me the next day. He was the one whose roof our tree tried to shatter, the one who was storing some of our produce in his fridge, and the one who let us charge our portable battery each day.

When he answered the door, Lou lifted his index finger—thank God it was the index finger—as if to pause him. With his other hand, Lou turned off the very bright LED light on his headlamp. After all, he didn’t want to be impolite, and he’d already heard from us multiple times how rude it is to shine such a light directly into someone’s eyes.

“I just wanted to say good night!” Lou said, just as he’d planned.

“Okay. And did your dad send you to get his battery?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

“Okay, come on in and I’ll get it for you.”

“Okay! And I just wanted to say good night to your dog. Good night, dog!”

Then Lou took the charger from him and made the twilight trek back home. He didn’t want to miss a single second of the sleepover—back to the basement floor for these lucky kids!

On Sunday, it rained again. Hard. Down poured. For hours.

When we were able to check the energy company’s website for an update, they predicted our neighborhood would be restored sometime on Monday, and they noted that today’s rain might set them back even further. Tighe almost cried.

But instead, he went to our country club to work out some stress, charge his laptop, and use their Wi-Fi while I took our kids to see the new Spiderman movie. Since I don’t really like superhero movies, I couldn’t really follow most of it, but there were some amusing jokes in there. I would have preferred Indiana Jones, but this power outage wasn’t about me. It was about our kids living their best lives.

For dinner that night, we grilled hot dogs and sausages, and I made a salad with spinach that was starting to slime—it was not one of the items chosen for our neighbor’s fridge. We ate in dim half-light in the dining room. It was grim. Tighe was on edge, and the kids, ever insensitive to anyone outside of themselves, were finally starting to pick up on it.

“I feel sorry for the 6th grade football boys that Tighe’s training tomorrow morning,” I texted to two of Nate’s friends’ moms. I had a feeling they were about to have the most difficult workout of their young lives.

Another friend, a few blocks over, texted: “I can’t take it anymore! I’m packing up and headed to my mom’s house to do some laundry and sleep in the AC tonight.”

How nice that she had that option. At that moment, I would have started searching real estate near my parents in Pennsylvania, but I didn’t want to waste my precious phone battery.

On Monday morning, about 65 hours without power at this point, we checked the website again. Their notorious outage map was shrinking, which meant they were making progress, restoring power to more and more households, but I couldn’t get any anecdotal proof of this. “We’re hoping to restore most of Kansas City by tonight, and whatever we don’t finish, we’ll push to Tuesday morning.”

Tighe groaned and dragged himself to the park to coach Nate’s football team while he brainstormed a plan to get some work done that day. So while I took the kids to the pool to swim and charge my phone, he headed to the public library. The same public library that I’ve taken our kids to every single week since we moved to Kansas City in 2013.

“That is a sketchy place,” he said when he returned home that afternoon. “I don’t think I’ll ever go there again.”

I was starting to get irritable myself. The dirty laundry was starting to overflow out of the laundry room, I was dying for some clean sheets on the bed, and even though we were trying our hardest to use paper plates and plastic utensils, the dirty dishes were accumulating all over the kitchen counters. And the thought of rotting food in our two refrigerators was starting to eat at me.

We need power.

Joe Rogan says it all the time: if you want to destroy this country, just kill our power grids. We don’t have the fortitude, nor the skills, to survive without all the luxuries and conveniences that electricity provides. We take it for granted.

And so, just before dinner on Monday, at 73 hours, our power came back on. We cheered in our house! Lou celebrated by flipping switches just to confirm they worked. The older kids put away their decks of cards and flocked to the basement TV. Tighe switched on his beloved monitors in his office and began typing away, probably a blog about plumbing parts or something.

My phone buzzed again and again with celebratory texts from neighbors and friends and family I’d been complaining to through our ordeal. I started the washing machine and the dishwasher almost immediately. And so joyfully!

And so, when the power went out again on Tuesday afternoon, about an hour after I’d finished restocking the fridge and folding the last the towels to completely catch us up in the never-ending laundry race, we were understandably devastated.

The good news is—and Tighe makes fun of me when I start sentences with that phrase—it didn’t last. About an hour later, it was restored. The utility trucks were still stalking our neighborhood, looking for problem spots and low-hanging limbs, soggy and weak from all the wind and rain the last few days.

I breathed a sigh of relief that our newly acquired groceries would be safe at least for the time being. But more questions remained: would we get through the rest of the summer without losing power again? How long will we go without a generator? How many more nights will the kids voluntarily sleep on the basement floor? And what happened to the quarter of the watermelon Lou was helping me cut up for dinner tonight? Is it hidden somewhere in the house or did it go to Heaven as he claims?

I have a feeling that’s a blog for another day.