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When the power was kicked off-line during the storm a couple of weeks back, I did what I usually do. I waited for five minutes and then wondered why it wasn’t back on. We have a power station on our street, and I swear, I can count on one hand the number of times our hydro has stayed off longer than an hour.

At the 30-minute mark, I ran and had a shower in case the water heater stopped pumping out hot water. As I stood in the darkened shower stall, I thought about Laura Ingalls breaking the ice in her basin so she could wash her face, hearing in my head the winter winds fiercely blowing around her in her little house. The one on the prairie. I decided it is far more dramatic to have no power in the winter in Wisconsin than in Burlington in late May, though this would be slightly mitigated if you didn’t know what hydro was. Reading those books as a kid just made me want to earnestly suffer her travails, right up until it caused an actual dent in my privileged world.

After an hour, I double-checked the batteries in a couple of flashlights and used my phone to check on the whole situation. Everywhere in the vicinity was out, with no good estimates of when power might be restored. I decided I would do crossword puzzles, but had to plug an Ikea lamp into my computer to see what I was doing. I realized this would drain my computer, so I went looking for the portable battery charger that lives in the car. This, of course, led to a philosophical debate on how you should responsibly use a few scant hours of power.

Laura Ingalls never had to worry about her computer running out of power. Or her Ikea lamp.

I called my sisters to compare stories, and secretly decide who I would be going to live with if the power never came back on. They didn’t know that part. I told Gilly my power had been out for nearly two hours.

“Remember the big ice storm?” I asked her. “We didn’t even lose power then.”

“I was little. I remember endless streams of people coming in to be fed,” she said.

We agreed the ice storm was in 1971. We remembered my dad making us walk to Lakeshore Public School despite the fact our house was full of hungry people with no power because we weren’t allowed to miss school. We were the only people there and the doors were locked, so we turned around and came home. To this day, I swear my dad thought we were lying.

Still power-free, a walk around the neighbourhood an hour later revealed a house two streets away absolutely pulverized by a huge tree. Finding out the resident was OK was a relief, but the destruction was eye-opening. I was reminded, again, of my dad, who, after storms, would offer to take down damaged trees if he could have the wood.

I consider a man today, armed with a chainsaw, walking up a stranger’s front step and think about how much the world has changed.

I considered doing yardwork as things dried out and glanced at the lawn dethatcher Gilly had dropped off for me to borrow. The thought of tearing out dead stuff is satisfactory to me; I rip out buckets of weeds every day. As I hauled the weird little machine out of the garage, I realized it was electric. I called Gilly back.

“I need a few more days with the machine, is that OK?”

“You mean Margaret?” she asked.

“Margaret De Thatcher. That’s what we call it.”

And to think there was a time I thought my dad was the strangest one in the family.

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