Praying for Sunshine

The small battery-powered FM radio notifies us that many powerlines are down. This is the cold snap of the century. We don’t know how long it will be out, and we are in a rural area. Bundling up, we walked a quarter of a mile to my grandmother’s sturdy foundation house. Where we rely on her ancient castiron stove to keep us warm and cook, fed only as much wood as necessary to keep the temperature barely warm enough to be comfortable. We’ve put quilts over the doorway to the hall and door outside to keep in as much of the warmth as possible. Hunkering down, we wait for the pot of snow to heat up and boil for water and coffee to percolate.

There isn’t much to do, so I make do with writing. For now, I can feel my fingers in my gloves well enough to write. The ink in my pen and paper in my pad have not run out yet or frozen. We are beholden to the daylight hours, a single oil lamp in the living room doesn’t provide as much light as we would hoped. We conserve fuel. If we are wise with it, Dad and my brother won’t have to go out and cut more firewood. But he goes out anyway to sit in the car and charge our phones. Otherwise, we conserve our energy. We might be in this situation for a long time, so we wait and pray for the sunshine.