A Child Is Born: Part II

Wednesday morning dawned bright and clear. Our ice coated world shimmered and glistened in the light of the early sun. In spite of the beauty, though, I was a bit despondent. It looked like we’d be without power for many days, we had no water, and my baby was already two days late. I knew that braving a trip to the market would be pointless; there are always many other unprepared people, and the stores, if they even opened, would be bare. David, though, is always resourceful and he evaluated our situation calmly and rationally. The most important task, I suspect he was thinking, was to get a cup of coffee. And this is when David remembered a valuable asset I had completely forgotten about: the big box of camping gear.

We had two camp stoves, a percolator, and a propane tank for the grill still half full. Breakfast! And coffee! While I prepared a meal, David set about providing for our immediate needs. Water should have been easy enough, as we have a large pond on the property, but David was looking for a cleaner water source. The day was just warm enough to melt the icicles hanging from the eaves, so David set out buckets to catch the runoff. We got a few gallons that way, plenty for keeping hands and dishes clean, though it was frigid stuff. We tried snow melt, too, but snow takes up an awful lot more space than the water it’s made from. More icicles, broken off the roofs and stashed in a cooler, and we had refrigeration, too. It looked like we might make it.

Just in case we had to get out, David started up the tractor and made an effort to plow out our driveway. Other farmers on other tractors cleared the road. Sometime during the day, the horses’ owners showed up and we had news of the outside world. Thankfully, the major roads were mostly clear of ice, as was ours, thanks to those farmers. There were only downed trees to drive around. Except for the fact that we’d just eaten our second-to-last loaf of bread for lunch, things were looking up.

And then, miracle of miracles, at 2:30 in the afternoon, the lights flickered on, wavered a moment, then burst into full and glorious light. We had electricity. I didn’t know how long it would last, so my first priority was drawing as much water as I could, filling the tubs and all of the pitchers. I turned on the tap only to discover, to my consternation, that we still weren’t pumping water. It took us a while to determine that there wasn’t enough pressure in the storage tank for the system to work, and it took us even longer to figure out how to fix it, but fix it we did, and we were back in business.

Later, we learned that several members of the electric cooperative’s board of directors live on our street. It’s nice to have neighbors in high places. I don’t know of anyone else who had power restored so quickly. Most of our near neighbors didn’t see the light until Friday or Saturday, and some unfortunates are still, even now, in the dark. That afternoon, David’s friend and coworker called to check up on us. His family would be with us for most of the rest of the week, only going home to sleep, as we had heat, hot water for showering and laundry, and the means to prepare food. I was glad enough to cook for the extra people as I’d noticed, even with the power restored, that the big freezer seemed to be thawing. I had a lot of food in there to eat.

And then, Wednesday night, as I was bathing and dressing the children for bed, I noted a change. It’s impossible to define or quantify the difference when those contractions change from the mere muscular workout of pregnancy to the real thing of labor, but it’s obvious. An hour later, I told David and he clocked a few to see what sort of timeline we might be looking at. He was unimpressed. “That didn’t even last half a minute,” he said. I shrugged. “Okay,” I replied. “Let’s go to bed, then.” And so we did.