I've decided to discuss everything by the given names of yesteryear. Ice box. Dungarees. Moving pictures. Victory gardens. The reverie comes naturally when it rained so hard that the fields are flooded and the power is out.
We sit in an enhanced silence. We are quiet, but there is an assembly of ten thousand bugs and frogs and birds outside our open screened doors. Creatures. Wild and declaring themselves so.
From my living room perch, very much located in the center of the universe, I can hear the river sloshing up against what is left of the banks. It is not yet high tide and yet the water is everywhere. The horizon suspends the distant tree line in between the light grey haze of the sky and the muted mirror reflection of the water.
Not much movement out there, just raindrops.
It is admirable that the mother duck that has been visiting all spring still has all of her ducklings. They now have adult feathers, but you can still pick out the one that is the mom. While the others wade around in puddles searching for snacks she is actively lifeguarding. A head above everyone else. She is a good mom.
I am content to sit in the still and shadow of the house. Lighted by a single emergency lantern and folded up into this wingback chair I am just fine here. The air is cooling off at the end of the day and the occasional lift from the faint cross breeze through the doors gives just enough. It is enough.
The dog has now joined me as she does. She wears a yellow bandana with a bumble bee pattern and perked up radio antenna ears. Maybe she wonders why we are so quiet and why the world is not illuminated like it usually is. Or maybe she just wants treats because she always wants treats.
They say the power company is dispatched to fix the outage, but the romantic in me wants a few more moments to imagine the past. The fireflies start winking at us. They have lights right now. Those cheeky insects. Flashing their bioluminescence. They may have chemistry on their side, but our little lantern is doing just fine.
It is good to be just fine.
I feel my body relax into the contentment. The just-enough-ness of it all. The sabbath nature of the power outage. Because we do enough. We are busy and doing things all the time. It is an honest kind of retreat just to write and sit and hear the birds chirping and signaling the end of the storm.
Perhaps the lights will come on again soon. Perhaps a time traveler will pull up in their horseless carriage and stop for a visit. And we can talk about everything and nothing in particular. The weather, the water, the crops in the soggy fields. That would all be just fine.
And with that last sentence. The lights come back on.