Yesterday at 3:20 p.m. our electricity went out, as did that of 10,000 of our neighbors. It didn’t come back on until 9:25 p.m. Fortunately, we had our Thanksgiving Feast just after noon. We built a fire in our new fireplace, lit candles, and spent the evening like the pilgrims and our other pre-electricity forebears for thousands of years did. Well, they probably didn’t play Lord of the Rings Monopoly by firelight, but still. It was actually a very pleasant evening.
But my heart goes out to everyone here who planned to have their Thanksgiving dinner in the evening! I don’t know what they did or how they coped. Everywhere else in the country where I have lived, power outages have been taken care of within an hour. This is the third time in the year and a half since I’ve been in Virginia that we’ve had a power outage of six hours or more. I realize that Dominion Power must have had its workers off for the holiday, but that would not have been the problem those other times. And we didn’t even have a bad storm, just some wind that would be a stiff breeze in the midwest. So I don’t know why Virginia’s power grid is so fragile and why it takes so long to put it to rights.
Still, I am thankful for the gift of electricity.
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