On Again, Off Again

Day 79: Snow in the Pacific Northwest isn't light and fluffy as a general rule. It's soggy, sloppy, and it clings to evergreen branches until the sheer weight of its accumulation causes it to fall. "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" isn't the Frostian idyll one might suppose, not here. Linger too long under a tree, and you might be crowned by an icy widow-maker. While humans can exercise certain precautions to protect themselves against assault by snow bombs, overhead power lines are possessed of no such means, and thus it was that I have spent much of this last week without electricity. Duration of the outages ranged from an hour to eight hours with just enough space in between to bring the house back up to a liveable temperature and cook a postponed meal. When during an outage it gets too cold indoors, I light the propane fireplace, never turning it up to a great roaring blaze, but rather keeping it at the lowest setting; an aboriginal fire, just enough to take the edge off, conserving the scant resource. Hovering by the flames, my thoughts run to the days of winter duty in a backcountry cabin without heat or light and buried in snow up to the roof. I marvel now at how I survived and even enjoyed that experience. Ah, the invincibility of youth! Those were good days, forty winters gone.