When we went to bed the night of October 29, power was already out. We had been outside to see the snow coming down on the autumn leaves that still dangled from tree branches.
Some people we know only got power (and water and phone and internet) back last week, over ten days after the storm. We were lucky; we only lost power and water for three days, and we still have an old fashioned land-line (rather than phone through the cable company) so my grandmother's black rotary-dial phone still worked.
The night of the storm, we slept in the living room downstairs, worried that the giant tulip poplar would fall in the night and crush our bedroom. We heard lots of cracking and crashing through the night (at one point we woke and I said to Amy, "Well, the house didn't shake so I guess that tree didn't hit us!"). When we woke in the morning, one day before Amy's Halloween birthday, the snow and devastation were unbelievable.
Large trees were leaning on power lines everywhere. We read that this was the most widespread power outage ever in Connecticut, and that there were even more trees down than we had seen two months earlier from Hurricane Irene (many trees resting on power lines and across roads).
One article in the Washington Post suggests that although global warming is increasing the amount of extreme weather we get, scientists don't yet know whether the freakish snowstorms of the past year are anything other than random aberrations. I must admit that while I enjoy the drama of the wild weather, the experience palls after a few days hauling water to flush the toilets. But the interruption of modern conveniences and the downed trees littering our yard don't erase the beauty that we had for a few hours, the day before Halloween, when the sun came out and the too-early winter landscape shone radiant.
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