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PatchWork
by Joyce Whitis |
Tom finished up the mowing just before dark, we'd had dinner and done the dishes. As he headed toward the shower the electricity stopped! It was still light enough so we didn't stumble around in the dark, but dark-thirty was fast approaching.
Damn! Not again!
But ofcourse it WAS again! The electricity, which we depend upon as an unborn child depends upon the umbilical cord that connects it to life, had an outage. Doing without lights is a sobering thought in itself, also doing without cool air, bathing, washing, TV, the Internet, radio, clocks, microwaves, flushing, is enough to make you tear your hair....really! Add to this operating a dairy and you go ballistic in a hurry.
When you are standing in the middle of a barn full of cows with the milking machines going swish...swish, the automatic feeders going chunk...chunk, and the milk in the stainless steel tank going zoom....zoom and Willie is singing about Mamas who let their babies grow up to be cowboys, and the electricity goes off, man You just have to know that you've got one of the biggest problems known to man.
Been there....done that....and it was hardly any fun at all. Everything around a dairy operation is dependent on those fragile wires that bring the current into the barn and circulate it all around where it gets special instructions about which doors to open and which tanks to cool and which milking machines to hang up. Without electricity, milk hands would have to do without automatic coffee makers and without that coffee at 3:00 in the a.m., how can a person be expected to harvest that milk? Without electricity there are no security lights to see how to herd in the cows and there is nothing to milk them with, once they get penned behind the parlor. Since water well pumps operate with electrical current, if the electricity stops there is no water, a real bad time to bring this up what with all the other stuff going on.
So when the electricity went off the other night, Tom and I were a little uncomfortable but not as bad off as we have been when we physically went up to the barn to milk the cows. We could sit in our house and stare back at each other across a room lit by a kerosene lamp.
That lamp belonged to my parents and is probably close to 90 years old. We keep oil in it and anytime the giant energy goes out, we drag out this old lamp, light it and start swapping stories. Tom's aren't near as good as mine since he grew up in a Dallas suburb and had electricity while I grew up in west Texas on a cotton farm where that miracle of modern science was unknown.
Since we couldn't see television, I brought my little battery operated radio into the living room and we tuned into the Ranger ballgame. The pitiful light from the kerosene lamp in the middle of the dinning room table, and the broadcast made me think I was back on that cotton farm in the 30's. I was seated next to my dad and together we were listening to a game played by heroes in some distant place.
But it wasn't nighttime. Back then baseball games were played in the daytime, not many parks had lights, so I remember the battery radio and baseball games in the afternoon.
There is a flickering circle of light in the middle of the dinning room table and I am in a horsehair chair over by the old Philco Radio, listening to the Lux Radio Theater. Pretty soon I'll hear my mother telling me that I need to get my homework done and to "Turn off that radio!" I know that before long I will have to get out my arithmetic assignment and do all the problems over there in that little circle of light.....but not just yet. Just for a little while, just until I hear the final music and know that Bette Davis is really going to get the guy, I'll sit here in that peculiar dark that accompanies kerosene lighting and pretend that the world is really a different place.
With just a slight sound and a surge of light, the electricity that left us so quickly is just as quickly back. We walk over to that lamp, whose yellow light illuminates such a small space, and cupping a hand around the glass globe, blow out the light. The air-conditioner starts to whir and we are conscious of all the little workings of that master....Electricity.