A funny couple of things happened this last week. Well, not really funny-ha-ha, per se, but more like “we can laugh about this as soon as we figure out how to get around it” kind-of-funny. My husband Rick was leaving for work early one morning, pushed the button to open the garage door and nothing happened. The spring on the door had broken and that essentially locked him in the garage. It turns out that a spring is a terrific mechanical aid not just for electrically opening the door, but also manually. He called his handy younger brother to help – or fix if he could – and between the two of them they managed to get the door to open and free our vehicles into the driveway until we could get the door fixed.

And then yesterday, almost immediately after his alarm went off, the power in the house went AWOL. After a few extra minutes in bed, he got up and tried to figure out how to get enough light in the bathroom so that he could shower and get ready for his day. He did it mostly in the dark, which heightened our appreciation for bathrooms in our past that have had windows. He finished getting ready – without the usual Global News in the background – and headed to the garage when he realized that for the second time in a week, he was locked in again. However, with the new spring, it wasn’t too hard for me to help him open the door and release him – although we do question the door designer who failed to add grabber-handles on the inside.

Ah, electricity! How do we use thee? Let me count the ways! Lights, coffee, garage doors! And need I mention that very special friend of mine: the Internet. Oh sure, I could use some data on my phone if I really needed to. But I didn’t REALLY need to. Unless, of course, this pesky power outage persisted.

But it didn’t. Pretty much an hour later, at 7:15 when lots of people are just getting up, the hum and shine of my interior domicile resumed and I didn’t have to entertain the idea of breaking out the camp lantern later that night or running my laptop battery down to zero.

But what if the power didn’t come back on? My brain was rehearsing this thought for the few minutes before the electricity resumed. Remembering stories of ice storms that resulted in power-less days-on-end made me question how prepared we really are. Can we cook? Can we bathe? Can we internet? And if I take it further, thinking about Emily St. John Mandel’s book Station Eleven, when the electricity leaves and never returns, how happy would I be then?

In some ways, this pandemic has made me think about things like this. What sort of things can I live without? And how do I make my peace with the things lost that I have no say about? No gatherings of family of any real size. No traditional celebrations. No concerts. No farmer’s markets – well, not ones that aren’t highly policed and sanitized. No eating out inside or outside a restaurant. And some of the time, no haircuts, no libraries, no school inside the actual schools.

But we endure, even if it’s not all how we like it to be. I’m thankful that it’s spring and that the warm weather allows for walks together or visiting outside. There’s still thankfully the internet and the ability to Zoom if we want to. And there’s the hope that if we fix what needs to be fixed and we work together, we can bust out of our garages and be free again someday soon.