Heavy winds rage throughout the night. Power goes out. It is early Monday morning.

At the start, I do what I can to capture the sun’s warmth, and trust it is only a matter of time before power returns. Hours pass in anticipation.

As soon as the sun begins to set, the apartment gets colder by the minute. My neighbor calls PECO (our electricity provider) and learns power will be restored at midnight. I think: I can handle that.

There is an option to go down the street to a neighbor, but I do not want to go. I want to be in my own bed. I want to be at home. I collect candles and light them in front of mirrors to double the effect. After a while, I call PECO myself, and the system says 11PM. Hope buoyed, I get in bed.

When I decide to call PECO again to see if there are any updates, I listen to the whole message and hear something I missed: 11PM. On Wednesday. February 19^th. Two days later.

It would be simple to pack a small bag and go down the street to my neighbor. Tomorrow, I say to myself. Tomorrow I will go. Although it is early, I am tired and go to sleep lightly, aware that it is cold, increasingly fearful that I will have to move out. I wonder how cold it will get inside if the outside temperature is 18 degrees without accounting for wind chill. I think about the pipes and imagine them bursting and having to move out for a longer period of time.

I know well how to travel, to pack, to leave, to live on someone’s couch or in a guest room, but cuddled under the blankets, I think of the well-known helicopter parable. Of the man whose house is flooding, who climbs to the second floor and then out to the roof. In the story, two boats and a helicopter come by to help him, as the waters rise all around him. He turns each one down because he believes God will save him. (The moral: God helps those who help themselves, and He works through our connections with one another. The joke: when the man dies after not accepting rescue, he meets God and asks Him: Where were you when I needed you? And God replies: I sent you two boats and a helicopter.)

Several times throughout the day I receive offers of help: to be somewhere else for a few hours, to warm up, for light, for the night. At each turn, I say no.

Throughout the evening, calls and texts come in with needs from family or volunteer work. Each one makes me increasingly irritable. I want to yell, “Everyone just leave me alone. Stop asking me for things.” I am talking to myself, too.

Now it is very late; temperatures drop inside and outside. As it gets colder and darker, like in sickness, I enter a strange sort of survival mode. I feel myself recede from any connection to anyone, even the ones who love me. I sense my connection to my home, and I note somewhat deliriously, “Maybe the man in the flood doesn’t take the boats or the helicopter not because he doesn’t believe, not because he’s waiting for God, but because he doesn’t want to leave home.”

A dawning compassion reaches me for the people who stay in the face of massive evacuation orders. I have a dose of empathy for my mother, too, who insisted on staying in our family home long after it was practical, choosing austerity over rupture, departure and change. The demands associated with leaving may seem too great to bear. Perhaps one’s home is something sacred in its own right.

At the same time, I see how unreasonable I am being, yet I am curious, fascinated to observe my primal response. There are hints of Stockholm; the door is open, I can walk out. I can be warm, two blocks away.

As my exhaustion grows, it occurs to me that this little home is my one secure attachment at the moment. My first home of my own, its contents are finally out of boxes since 2019 (some since 2014).

Recently I have had a feeling that I have not been looking after myself well. Under the covers, I note a sense-message from me to myself, “Why have you forsaken yourself? Why have you done so little to feel fully alive? Why have you sold yourself short? Why did you stop believing in yourself?” These are not new questions. Some have even been remedied, albeit temporarily. Maybe it is the contrast between the two—between warmth and cold, between light and darkness, between joy and sadness, between power and powerlessness—that make stark the difference.

A few days ago I had a massage, and when the masseuse hit a point in my shoulder blade, tears overcame me, as if locked in my back was all of my disappointment, disregard and dismay. An awakening of pain, and endless efforts to push it away, banked within me.

In this liminal, cold, dark space, desperate for sleep, thoughts turn from my mother to my father. I always saw him as a peacemaker for Mom and me, as well as in his work as an old-school attorney. He put genuine energy into others’ peace of mind. But really, Dad, you can’t create another’s peace of mind, can you? I sense how I have done myself few favors, trying to save others. I have been seeking their peace, light and warmth that may never come. I’ve allowed this to keep me from being fully alive myself. I’m not sure what all of this means, nor what to do about it. I am just trying to see, first.

It’s getting warmer under the covers. It’s getting colder in my room.

As it gets later and later, I realize I was really stupid not to pack up and go. I remember the big flood in Deerfield when I had a child and two animals in my care. There was no question but to evacuate. I don’t think I gave a second thought to my possessions.

But this less serious circumstance gives me insight: How much I want peace for my loved ones. And how my home is my attachment object. I am only as healthy as my parents were; “I have become them.”* (A line from ACA.)

Finally I fall into a deeper sleep with the phone under my pillow to keep it warm and functioning. (Clearly, I imagined it freezing, like outdoors.) It buzzes at 2:30AM, and I open my eyes to the small light I have on my home altar that I turn on in the morning and extinguish at bedtime. It is a way that I remind myself to pray, to be hopeful and grateful.

My incoming text is from the young woman who lives downstairs. She reports that a friend of hers has buddies who work at PECO. He called in a favor. When doing a larger job in our area, they zipped by to restore our power in the middle of the night. Later I think of the parable again—of the boat and helicopter pilots, like the PECO guys—performing acts of kindness for strangers, human connections to the divine.

Baseboards spring to life with their symphony of gurgles and pings, music to my ears. The increased warmth is immediately obvious. All of my dark thoughts fall away.

Heat and light are restored, and peace descends of its own accord.

*A line from Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA) that I’ve struggled with accepting, but it seems fitting in this moment.