Homecoming

When I think of the word "homecoming" I think of my return to the Puget Sound region in July of this year. Sometimes, of course, it conjures memories of October football games and their attendant festivities. I had never, however, thought of it in the terms that this power outage has brought home.

Our power went down somewhere between midnight and 1:10 a.m. Friday (my wife had woken up and seen her clock at midnight, and I woke up to darkness and checked my cell phone at 1:10). For the purposes of counting time, I call it 1:00 a.m.

We ate breakfast in a local restaurant that somehow had power amidst blocks of darkness, including a dark gas station across the street from it. We managed to make a dinner of those staples we could salvage before the food went bad , sleeping that night under much bedding as the temperature dropped into the low 50s inside the house.

Saturday was as dark as Friday, and once more we ate restaurant food in the morning, purchasing dinner at a supermarket that was back up and running. By that point, most of Bellevue had seen power restored, though the suburbs were largely without electricity. By the time we turned in Saturday night, the temperature in the house was below 50.

Sunday saw my wife getting worried. She could see her breath while lying in bed. She could see our cats' breath. She was more concerned for them, in fact, than for us. Assurances that the cats would be fine are, if you will pardon the pun, cold comfort under such conditions. While my wife and I were packing up our computers at the library, she mentioned that she had read about area shelters. We drove to Bellevue High School, my alma mater, and checked out the situation.

The Red Cross volunteer who greeted us explained that she, too, was without power and that she, too, had a cat. The cats would be fine, she told us. My wife teared up, and I was a half step from that stage myself. We were educated. We lived in a good neighborhood. We shouldn't need to stay in a shelter, or at least we shouldn't need to for something as silly as wind. This isn't Katrina, after all. Still, we resolved to stay the night.

We headed home to gather some things, and my mother made it back as we were about ready to head out the door. We passed on the assurance that the cats would be fine and urged her to come with us.

The three of us arrived around 6:30 p.m., in time for dinner with sandwiches, hot soup, and all manner of packaged food. It was the first time in more than two days that we had felt normal. I managed to get a hot shower for the first time since before the shower had gone out (my wife and mother had showered that morning at the YMCA, where they have a joint membership).

We slept a little fitfully on cots. Some of the gymnasium lights power on and off periodically. People snored. Cots squeaked. Infants cried. It was a good night.

This morning my wife and I woke up before 8:00 a.m. and got some breakfast before heading home to check about the power. The cats were fine, but the power situation showed no signs of being worked on. Nearby transmission lines that were down remained in the same state, complete with uprooted trees.

Right now it looks as if we are looking at another night here. Right now it looks as if it will be at least tomorrow before normalcy, rather than the so currently precious sense of normalcy, has any chance of returning to our lives, and even that will be a incomplete, given that almost everything in the refrigerator and the freezer will be stinking up the trash.

No, this is not the kind of homecoming I imagined, here less than a year from my twentieth high school reunion. Maybe, though, this is better than a football game. After all, they won the state championship without my being in the stands.