The line on Buckner Ridge came down at 4:11 PM Tuesday under about an inch of glaze ice, and by 4:35 I had every candle in the house lit and was crying a little in the good way. I want to be clear about something before I go further: this storm was not a disaster for our family. It was an intervention.
Cleo had been dysregulated for weeks. We’re talking screen-jaw, shallow breathing, asking for snacks she didn’t actually want — classic signs that the ambient EMF in the house had finally crossed a threshold her little nervous system could not metabolize. The router, the smart meter Duke Power forced on us in 2022, the neighbor’s Ring doorbell pointing more or less at our compost. It adds up. The second the grid went down, I watched her shoulders drop a full inch. By candle two she was lying on the kitchen floor with the dog, breathing through her nose for the first time since Christmas.
I am part of a Facebook group called “Outages Are Medicine: Reclaiming the Dark,” which has about 14,000 members and a pinned post from a woman in Vermont whose son’s eczema cleared up during a four-day ice storm in 2019. She’s not a doctor but her husband worked for Eversource for eleven years, which is honestly more relevant. The consensus in the group is that the human vagus nerve was calibrated for firelight and cannot tell the difference between a Tuesday and a Sabbath when the lights are off. I felt this Tuesday in my bones.
Now — and I want to be honest because this column has always been a place of honesty — we did run the generator. But only for the bone broth, which was on hour 38 of a 48-hour simmer and represented the marrow of three pasture-raised femurs from Levi at Hollow Creek Farms, and you cannot just let that go cold. I also ran an extension cord out to the chest freezer because losing the elderberry syrup stockpile would have been a separate kind of public health crisis. The generator is not on the grid. It runs on diesel, which is essentially fossilized plankton, so spiritually it counts as ancestral.
My husband Trey came out of his office around hour three because his Zoom died, and for the first time since maybe October he sat down at the table and looked at the children’s actual faces. He asked Wren what grade she was in. She told him. They had a whole conversation. I went and stood in the pantry for a minute because I did not want to ruin it by being witnessed.
The twins drew with the ends of burnt corks on butcher paper, which I am pretty sure is what charcoal is, and which my sister-in-law Janelle — she works the front desk at a pediatric office in Black Mountain and is basically a nurse — says is excellent for fine motor development and also pulls toxins through the fingertips. We ate sourdough with raw butter by the woodstove. Nobody asked for an iPad. Cleo fell asleep at 7:40 PM, which has not happened in this house since she was weaned.
When the power came back on Wednesday at 6:18 AM the fridge made that aggressive hum it makes and Wren actually flinched. The router blinked back to life and I watched the air in the room change. Cleo asked, in a very small voice, if we could turn it off again. I told her we could not, baby, because Daddy has a call, but that Mommy heard her and that her body was very wise to notice.
I’ve been telling everyone at pickup. Marlene is now in talks with someone at the co-op about a “voluntary blackout circle” — a Friday night where a group of families on her road agree to flip their main breakers from sundown to sunrise and just sit with whatever comes up. She’s already drafted a waiver. Janelle thinks her insurance might cover it under behavioral health. I think they’re onto something. The storm gave us a gift, and the gift was the silence, and the silence was the medicine, and the medicine was free, except for the diesel.