I’m sitting here during this area’s most recent ice storm and thinking back to the many other times when my husband and I were forced to suffer without power due to icy branches becoming too heavy and plummeting onto the power lines.
I still can remember one particular incident in mid-February about 15 years ago when I was cooking cheeseburgers in the kitchen on a Friday night. They were nearly done, sizzling nicely, and the lightly buttered buns were lying face down in another pan, toasting to golden perfection.
I opened the refrigerator door and reached in to grab the mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard and cheese. Suddenly, everything went black.
“Oh, great!” my husband’s voice came from his recliner in the living room. “What a time to have a power failure!”
At least he was safely sitting in his chair. I was bent over with my head in the refrigerator.
I felt my way across the kitchen to the cupboard where I kept a small stash of scented candles. I took them out, one by one, then inched my way back to the catch-all drawer to search for the matches. This involved blindly touching a variety of sharp, pointy, jagged and other pain-inducing items before I found them. Quickly I began to light the candles – lemon scented, bayberry scented, pine scented, sea-breeze scented – and plunked them down on the counter, the kitchen island and the dining table. I also handed one to my husband, which he set on the end table next to his chair.
The combined light from all of the candles, which, in my opinion, had the puniest wicks I’d ever seen, wasn’t even enough to cast a decent shadow.
I soon discovered that scented candles smelled really nice…if you burned them only one at a time. Burning them all at once, however, was a different story. The combination of scents filled the house with one giant scent that smelled like…well, let’s just say it was really...unique.
I managed to locate a small pocket-flashlight, then rushed back to the stove. Luckily, because it was a gas range, it always remained lit during power failures. Normally that would have been a good thing, but it wasn’t such a good thing at that moment, mainly because the stove had continued to cook everything while I’d been attempting to light a half-dozen candles.
The worst part was I really couldn’t tell if I’d burned the burgers or not because the flashlight was about as powerful as opening the blinds and using the moonlight to cook by.
But even in the near-darkness I soon realized the hamburger buns were long beyond done. When I touched them, they felt like tree bark. And when I aimed the flashlight at them, they looked about 20 shades darker than the golden brown I’d hoped for. Frantically, I grabbed a butter knife and scraped off all of the black parts on the buns, hoping my husband wouldn't know the difference…which wasn't easy while also trying to juggle the flashlight. I'm pretty sure I ended up scraping off some of the paint on it in the process.
Putting the condiments on the burgers was my biggest challenge. I wanted just the right amount of ketchup and mustard on mine. My husband, however, wanted ketchup and mayonnaise. As the flashlight grew dimmer, not only couldn’t I tell how much of anything I was putting on the burgers, I also had no idea what I was putting on them. I mean, I could have accidentally grabbed a jar of almost anything in the refrigerator.
“Is there any Pepsi in the fridge?” my husband asked.
“There might be,” I said. There were a lot of bottles in the darkened cavern that once had been my refrigerator. “Just don't blame me if I grab the bottle of vinegar by mistake.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I think I’ll just have a glass of water.”
He, carrying a lilac-scented candle in a jar, slowly made his way out to the kitchen, which wasn’t easy, considering he had two frightened dogs clinging to his pant legs. He located a glass in the cupboard, then held it under the kitchen faucet, turned the handle and waited.
I tried not to laugh. In our previous home, we always had water even when the power went out. But at this one, we had an artesian well with an electric pump. So no power, no water.
“You’ll be standing there for a long time if you want water,” I told him. “It
might be faster if you go outside, yank off one of the icicles that's hanging from the roof, and then stick it into your glass and wait for it to
melt.”
Not only did the realization he wasn’t going to get a glass
of water strike him, so did another more disturbing fact. “No toilet or shower,
either?” he gasped.
“’Fraid not,” I said, handing him a paper plate with his dried-up cheeseburger with maybe ketchup and mayo on it, or maybe mustard and mayo…or maybe something else, like grape jelly.
When I bit into my burger, I honestly thought I’d accidentally put the dish-scrubbing pad into the bun. It was dry, chewy and tasteless, and the bun was hard and crunchy. Also, I’d practically drowned the meat in ketchup because I’d only guessed at how much I was squeezing onto it. That actually turned out to be a good thing, however, because it provided the only moisture on what otherwise could have been described as a chunk of compressed sawdust. But unfortunately the ketchup didn't help to conceal the piece of cellophane I'd left on the slice of cheese.
I was just about to apologize to my husband for the fiasco of a meal when I heard him say, “Mmm, this burger is really good! It has a different flavor than usual."
The “different flavor” part concerned me. I immediately wondered what I’d actually put on his burger.
Alas, I never did find out.
And I think that's probably for the best.
Nowadays ice storms don't concern me much because I finally invested in an automatic generator system. It always pops right on when the power goes out and it keeps everything running smoothly. Yep, it's really great.
But I have to confess, it has made ice-storm power failures not nearly as much fun or as challenging as they used to be.
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
