Sunday was an odd day. Because of the 8” of snow that we had gotten 3 days before, as the temperatures rose and it became warmer and warmer, it became foggier and foggier. Looking outside it was almost eerie with fog so thick you could cut it with a knife.
12:15am, I’m sound asleep in bed when all of a sudden……………BRRRRRUMP…..and the house became completely silent……AND VERY VERY DARK! We had lost our power. It wasn’t storming out or anything so the reason behind it was a complete mystery. I reached over to tap Tim on the shoulder, or to at least find out if he was next to me only to find cold, unused sheets. I sat up in bed, threw the covers off of me and started heading towards the hallway whispering “Tim!”. To hear him respond “I’m getting a flashlight!” I asked if he knew what had caused the power to go out and he didn’t know.
We called in to AmerenUE, our local Power Company, to report the outage. I was not optimistic of a quick restore as for some strange reason, they listed off about 13 zip codes in our area that were experiencing outages as well and ours wasn’t listed at all – we were the first reporting outage. Tim and I grabbed flashlights, cell phones (for alarms) and climbed back into bed to settle in until one of the boys woke up. As I lay in bed, I could hear Tim’s rhythmic breathing lulling himself off to sleep and then it hit me…..the silence of our house without power was, well - deafening!
We normally have hepafilters and the drone of the intercom in the air in our room at night and the boys have a hepafilter and their CD player going all night long as well. Instead….the drone was gone, the hum was not there, nor were the beautiful lullabies that play my children to sleep, there was only silence – silence of a sleeping household. The silence of two busy boys resting and regaining their energy for another day. The silence of a tired father who works too much trying to get some much needed rest. The silence of life stopping on a dime until it was time to start again.
AND I COULDN'T SLEEP!!!!!
Instead, I lay in bed listening to Tim’s snoring until I heard the whimper, and then a scream from Mason as he woke up and was sitting in his crib, in the dark, wondering himself what was wrong and why were things so quiet? I quickly went into the boys room hoping to avoid Jack waking up too, grabbed Mason, and headed back to our room to lie down in our bed with him to go back to sleep.
As I lay there again, this time with Mason in the crook of my right arm, and then Tim next to him, I was slowly sent off to sleep by the sound of my husband AND my son’s snoring. Ahhhh……what a wonderful sound. Much better than the deafening dead silence of the darkness.
Only to be woken up again by the BRRRRUMMMMMPPPP.......beep.....as the power kicked back on 2 hours later as mysteriously as it had gone off.
