Outage brings back memories
By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

Sunday night, the electricity went off at our house just as I had gotten in the shower and soaped up all over and was shampooing my hair. The electricity had gone off earlier and had come on again. My son Timmy had taken a very quick shower and this is what I had planned to do when the electricity went off. Fortunately, I had filled the teakettle with water before I had gotten into the shower and I had five gallons of bottled water. We have a gas stove, so I heated some of the water on the stove to rinse my hair. It was only 6:30 in the evening when this occurred. We lit all the candles that we could find and Tom, Timmy and I played the game of Life.

The electricity came back on an hour into the game and we found that we weren't playing the game by the directions. It was hard to read the small print on the flyer in the box by candlelight. Tom won the game with the millions he ended up with.

The wind blew strong all Sunday night and the electricity went off several times during the night.

Whenever a storm blew in when I was young and there was a chance that the electricity would be going out, my mother would bake. The worst winter storm occurred when I was 10. It happened on St. Patrick's Day, March 17. My dad was foreman for the Freeborn County highway department and he had gone to bed right after supper the night before. He rose at 2 a.m. to get to the highway department headquarters to contact the men that operated the snowplows and salted and sanded the roads. This particular storm lasted four days and my dad made it home once to bring us water and kerosene.

The morning of the storm, before the electricity went off, mom made a large pan of dough, which she shaped into loaves of bread and cinnamon rolls and baked in her electric stove oven. There were eight children in the house, and we felt it was a nice break away from school as we ate cinnamon rolls and played games. Later in the day when the winds came up, the electricity went out. We heated the house with a wood furnace that was in the basement.

To make dinner, mom let the coals die down in the furnace and baked potatoes and grilled steaks. They were delicious. It snowed heavily every day and the wind blew strong at night, which created white out conditions. We were without electricity for five days. The day the snow finally quit falling and the wind died down, dad had a county snowplow come up our long driveway to clear the snow. The snow was piled in huge mounds in the yard. We called them mountains. For the first time ever, we could go sledding right in the yard. We built forts and tunnels and didn't want to go back in the house where we had been cooped up for four days.

Winter storms are dangerous, especially when a person is out driving on icy roads and in white-out conditions with heavy, snow-packed roads. It is also may be time to slow down without electronic distractions and you have to make your own entertainment. When the electricity goes out, it is a lot more work for farmers that have livestock to feed or if they are milking. For the workers that keep the roads clear, it is not a time to slow down, nor for the workers that have to keep the electric power stations operating.

My dad said often how much he hated winter and being exhausted after big snowstorms because he couldn't come home for days as he was in charge of the road crews. I have a lot of respect for these workers and I am cautious when the winds come up, the roads ice over and heavy snow falls. It is a time to slow down and withdraw indoors.