lessons from the cold
As I type this, it’s back in the 70s again, and this weekend, the weather was so lovely, I opened every window in the house to let the fresh air in. It was glorious.
When I was a kid — between the ages of 5 and 11, more or less — our family lived in a small fishing village in Mayaro, the southeastern corner of Trinidad. My dad was a petroleum engineer in the local production facility there, but really, the village was a rural outpost, at least 2 hours’ drive away from the nearest city. As a result, the infrastructure in the village wasn’t the most reliable — except that we could time the utility outages like clockwork.
Almost every morning, at around 8 a.m., the power would go out. This usually meant that the water would go out about 30 minutes later. This would last for about 12 hours. Our stove and oven were electric, but we had a little gas burner that worked off a propane tank to cook dinner, if necessary. We always boiled water, because it was the only way to drink it safely. Then, around 8 p.m., everything would come back. This was our cue to blow out the candles and put them where we could find them easily again, shower, and then fill up all of the buckets to make sure that we had water to flush toilets during the following day when the utilities would go out again. This went on for years.
Thing is? As much as this might sound like a hardship, it really wasn’t. It just was how it worked. Of course, this past experience helps frame a lot of my outlook and my day-to-day decisions in my current life. Like, power or water outages don’t really freak me out, because they don’t really last that long here in the US. I always have candles and matches or a lighter on hand. Whenever I’ve looked for a place to live, it’s important for me to have a gas cooktop — not for any of the culinary reasons that I’ve heard other people say they prefer gas (“it just cooks better”), but because with a gas stove, if the power ever goes out, I can still have a hot meal.
Last week hit, and I’m not going to lie, it was tough. Power outages suck, but being cold takes it to a whole other level. Still, the fact that I’d dealt with the dark before made the power loss not as big a deal — especially since we had the luxury of a small portable generator for our fridge, which was something we never had growing up (and also something we didn’t have with Hurricane Harvey — that was the lesson learned from that experience). We filled our bathtubs and containers way ahead of time, so when the water went out, we were prepared. When we were told that once the water came back, we’d be under a “boil-water notice” for at least a few days, I didn’t even bat an eye. And when day two and day three came, and we were cold and cell and internet service had ceased working and we felt completely cut off, I kept thinking, “We didn’t have cell and internet growing up in Mayaro, and everything was fine. We can handle this.”
And of course, we just piled on blankets, and stayed in one room, and we did handle it, always mindful that even with over 50 hours without electricity and 40 hours without running water, we had it so much easier than so many others in the city. We know we were lucky. And you know what? At some point in the future, we’re going to face some new challenge. And when the time comes and we’re dealing with that, I’ll think back to this past week, and remember: “We handled that weird Texas power crisis during that freak ice and snowstorm. And we handled Harvey. And both times we ended up fine, and we learned things in the process. So we’ll handle this.”
I mean, that’s how it works, right? For every tough time, we call on the wisdom that we gained from tough times past, and use it power through. We remember that we made it once before, and all evidence is that we’ll do it again. We look for the light, and remember that we can do hard things.
It’s what we’re wired to do.
a reminder of cadence.