I was still in bed on Thanksgiving morning when my husband, an early riser, came in and said, “The power just went out.”

I instinctively looked at the clock on my nightstand, which showed – nothing.

“What time is it?” I asked. “6:45,” he said, adding, “I called the power company. They already knew about it. They said it should be back on by 8:30.”

I did some quick mental calculations, based on the tasks and cooking I had planned for Thanksgiving dinner. Although it would be just the two of us this year, I still planned to make a traditional turkey dinner, but with a much-smaller-than-usual turkey, and fewer accompanying dishes. If the electricity was back on by 8:30, it wouldn’t cause a major disruption in the schedule.

Except that it wasn’t. A little before 8:30, the power blipped back on, then immediately went out again. Another call to the power company got us a recorded message saying they were reevaluating how long it would be before the power came back on. It ended up being four and a half hours.

That did cause a disruption in the schedule, but it wasn’t a problem. All it meant was that we would have our Thanksgiving dinner later than originally planned. In the meantime, we decided to drive around the neighborhood to try to determine how far out the power outage was, and to go somewhere where we could get a decent cell signal so we could call a few family members to tell them Happy Thanksgiving and let them know that our power was out and we would not be able to call, text, Zoom, or email until it came back on.

“Did you guys have another hurricane?” my sister wanted to know. “I’m having trouble keeping track of your storms.”

For the record, we didn’t. It wasn’t even storming, actually. We got some rain overnight and in the morning, but we still don’t know what caused the power to go out. It doesn’t really matter, though. I considered it to be one of those minor inconveniences that come every so often to remind us of how good we have it most of the time. The fact that it came on Thanksgiving morning just emphasized it all the more.

That was my take on it, anyway. And I had lots of time – four and a half hours, in fact – to think about it. And to give thanks.

November 27, 2020
©Betty Liedtke, 2020

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