When the lights go out

I was lying in bed watching short videos when the air conditioner stopped humming. Darkness suddenly covered the entire neighborhood like a piece of black velvet, and the battery of my mobile phone went out in the red warning of 10%.

Under the oak tree in the backyard, I met neighbors I hadn't seen for seven years.

"Look!" Ten-year-old Emily raised her arms covered with grass leaves, and groups of fireflies were weaving necklaces of light at her fingertips. Her mother sighed softly: "The last time I saw fireflies was when I was camping with my grandparents in Tennessee."

Frank, an 82-year-old veteran, sat on a folding chair, and condensation from beer cans fell into the grass. "During the blackout in New York in 1965," his rocking chair made a soothing squeak, "the whole block of people held a concert with a canned piano."

There was no weather forecast app, but Aunt Maria touched the moisture on the clothesline: "It will rain tomorrow afternoon." Her husband pointed to the spider webs between the maple branches - dewdrops strung on them into a crystal alarm clock. Benjamin, a programmer who just moved in, looked up at the starry sky: "It turns out that the handle of the Big Dipper really points to the North Pole."

We shared a basket of washed cherries, and the juice dyed our fingertips the color of the sunset. Kate's twins used branches to draw planetary trajectories on the mud. For the first time, they knew that the Milky Way was not the name of a prop in the game.

At three o'clock in the morning, when the power was restored, everyone squinted subconsciously. Emily cried and didn't want to go back to the house: "Will those stars be eaten by the Wi-Fi signal?" Benjamin quietly turned off the power switch of the router.

Now every Friday night, the power box in our community will "accidentally" fail for two hours. Children chase fireflies in the dandelions, and adults sing with old guitars. Last month, Frank taught Benjamin how to judge time by tree shadows-when the shadow of the oak tree crossed the picnic table for the seventh time, we knew it was time to light up the handmade paper lanterns for each other.

Sometimes, darkness is not the end, but another way to illuminate the world.