I sleep beneath four blankets while wearing two pairs of socks and thermal underwear beneath a sweatshirt and sweatpants.
The electricity was off when we went to bed. It’s off at five when I wake up, though I imagine it was on periodically during the night. It comes back on at six-thirty and then goes off again at eight.
“That’s an hour and a half,” from David, who’s trying to get a handle on the situation. “That means it’ll come back on at nine-thirty.”
“What makes you think so?” I ask, dismayed by his inadequate data.
“The grid’s on a timer.”
Ah, the grid. Spoken with authority, but I’m not buying it.
“It’s random,” I tell him. “There’s no timer. That’s why they’re called rolling power outages—rolling, as in bumping along without control.”
And random is exactly what it is—half an hour off, one hour on, forty-five minutes off, two hours on. How can I get through the day if I don’t know when I can watch television or sew? If this goes on much longer there will be tears.
David’s keeping a meticulous record of the ons and offs, striving to find predictability, though my theory of arbitrarianism is proved again and again.
In addition to all this discomfort and inconvenience, though we were warned that this weather was coming, I didn’t plan ahead, so we don’t have enough food in the house. I’m incapable of buying more than a few items at a time. My excuse is that during my formative early adulthood I carried a basket to the shops daily and bought eggs at the egg store, vegetables at the produce store, and meat at the butcher’s. I even bought my basket at the basket store. I still shop in quick raids, only grabbing a day’s necessities at a time.
So to the grocery store we go. The streets are dangerously icy, which draws unrelenting driving advice from David, who prefers to be driven, while, at the same time, is unable to tolerate not being in control of the damn car.
Oh no. There’s a line of people outside the store waiting to be allowed in. It’s seventeen degrees out here and the queue stretches from the door, along the length of the front sidewalk, and around the corner at the side of the building. When twenty people exit, a red-shirted monitor invites twenty people in. We join the line and huddle and shiver along with everybody else.
Masks, some. Coats, some. Lots of camouflage. Country grammar. Racial diversity, not at all. It’s Marble Falls—heavy white people as far as the eye can see.
The woman in front of us has two children—a seven-year-old and a toddler. The kids wear coats, no hats or gloves. They jump all over the place and the mother’s wearing herself out trying to keep them under control. She envisioned a quick run inside to get a case of water, but now she and her kids are freezing and it looks like she’s going to be late to wherever it is she needs to be. She borrows a phone from the woman in front of her. I listen to the call.
“I ain’t gonna be there when I said. Ain’t no water in the hotel, so I had to stop by the store. No power neither.” She listens for a few seconds, then says, “I love you, too.”
She returns the borrowed phone with a “thanks.”
To my surprise, David’s not the only one who’s certain that there’s a mighty guru in charge of the mythical grid. Everybody around us trusts that someone with knowledge is making wise decisions for the whole area.
“I’m sure they’re doing what they have to do,” the woman who loaned the phone states with inflexible certainty.
“There’s definitely a plan,” from the man in front of her.
“These electricity folks know what they’re doing,” from the mother of two.
Where is this faith coming from? Well, I guess if I’ve learned one thing in the last four years it’s that people lack wisdom when it comes to who or what they believe in.
David joins in. There’s nothing he enjoys more than a conversation with strangers.
“It runs in hour-and-a-half cycles,” he tells them with conviction, adding, “There’s a grid.”
A store employee comes out and shouts this announcement: “Sorry for the delay! Because of the power outages we all have to wait while the cash registers reboot.”
We all, he says; as though he’s standing out here with us. He goes back inside. And now there’s something else to grouse about.
“You’d think a grocery store would have a generator,” from the woman in front of the woman in front of us.
“How long does it take for cash registers to reboot?” the man behind us wants to know.
Thirty minutes later we’re allowed into the store.
“Get enough food for five days,” David tells me. “We don’t want to have to do this again tomorrow.”
Food to last five days? That’s never going to happen. Aside from my inability to shop in volume, I never think that far ahead. How will I know today what I’ll want for dinner tomorrow? Also, going to the grocery store is about all there is to do in Marble Falls.
Poor David. It must be hell to put up with my quirks.
This was a beautiful tree. I’m afraid David is going to have to re-landscape the whole front of the house after this.
Dilly hates this.
