The storm knocked the power out at 7:14 in the evening, which we know precisely because our daughter had just asked, for the third time, how many more minutes until her show, and the television answered by dying mid sentence.
For about ten seconds, the whole house was silent in that particular way a house is silent when every small hum you never noticed, the refrigerator, the router, the hallway light you forgot was even on, all stops at once. Then our daughter, six years old and unbothered by nuance, said, “Is this the end of the world?” and we had to explain, fairly quickly, that it was not the end of the world, it was simply a storm, and also that no, we could not check our phones to be sure, because apparently that defeated the purpose of the explanation.
We found candles in the drawer where candles go to be forgotten, half melted stubs from a birthday two years ago and one large one that smelled aggressively of vanilla, which Sam insisted on lighting first because, in his words, “if we’re doing this, we’re doing it with ambiance.” We found the flashlight, the good one, in the junk drawer, buried under takeout menus for restaurants that had closed years ago, still somehow the first thing everyone reaches for when the power goes out.
Dinner had been half made, so dinner became grilled cheese, assembled by candlelight, cooked on the gas stove, which Anna pointed out was the one appliance in the house that didn’t care one bit about the power grid. We ate on the living room floor, which our daughter declared was “way better than the table,” a review that was, frankly, a little insulting to the table, which has never once let us down.
With no television and no phones worth looking at, we did the thing every family swears they’ll do more often and then doesn’t. We played a board game, the ancient one with half the pieces missing, and improvised replacement pieces out of buttons and a single die we found from an entirely different game. Nobody remembered the actual rules, so we made new ones, and the new ones were, if we’re honest, more fun than the old ones had ever been.
Around nine, well past bedtime, with no clock reminding anyone of that fact, our daughter fell asleep on the floor mid sentence, in the middle of explaining an extremely complicated rule she had just invented about how buttons could fly. Sam carried her up to bed by flashlight while Anna blew out the candles one at a time, and for a minute, standing in the dark living room, the storm still going outside, it felt like the house had been returned to something simpler than it usually was.
The power came back at 11:40, we know that too, because it announced itself the way it always does, every light in the house snapping on at once, the refrigerator gasping back to life, the router blinking through its slow, self important restart. Neither of us got up to turn anything off. We just laid there for a second, blinking at the sudden brightness of the bedroom lamp neither of us remembered leaving on, and Sam said, “We should let it go out more often.” Anna said absolutely not, she liked electricity, she was simply glad it had happened once.
Our daughter asked about it for a week afterward. Not about the storm, not about the dark. About the game with the buttons, and whether we could play it again sometime, real rules or not. We have, a few times since, on nights when nothing in particular is wrong, when the power is perfectly fine and there was no real reason to unplug from anything at all. Turns out you don’t need a storm for that. You just need to decide, every so often, that the show can wait.
