Spending The Night In 1845
I left work on Friday at about noon, just as the snow was starting to fall pretty heavily. When I got home I parked the cars carefully, so I’d be able to broom all the snow off into the grass, instead of the driveway, where I’d have to shovel it.
I VPN’d into work the rest of the afternoon and at about six o’clock went out for the first round of shoveling. The snow at that point was wet and heavy. I started on the back deck, so that the dogs would have someplace to do what they needed to do. I then did the front patio, shoveled a path up our long driveway to where the cars are parked, dug them out and then did the sidewalk.
At around 11:30, I went out and started the whole thing again…at that point there was about ten inches on the ground. The snow was falling heavy and hard, whipped around by an increasingly forceful wind. I was at the front of the house when out of the corner of my eye I saw a bright blue-white flash. Then the street lights and every light in every window went dead. The lights flickered a couple more times and then finally succumbed to the weather.
The effect was downright spooky. I stood outside in total darkness, barely able to see across the street. The silence was total. Our house, and those around us, were built in the 1840’s. At that moment I had the rare opportunity to feel exactly what it would’ve been like standing out in front on a snowy midnight 170 years ago.
As it was late, I went back inside, right back into the 19th century. As I approached the house, I saw a single candle moving from room to room…Leslie putting the dogs in their crate for the evening. The darkness in the house was overwhelming. If it weren’t for the very small amount of ambient light outside reflecting off the snow, I have no doubt I wouldn’t have been able to see my hand in front of my face. Leslie has furnished and decorated the house to suit its age, so the illusion of time travel was intensified as we moved through the Windsor chairs, past the walls covered in fraktur paintings and up the stairs, with just the candle for light. Since the heat was dead too, we put an extra blanket on the bed and then jumped in to get warm.
Normally we have a space heater or a fan going in the bedroom more for white noise than anything else. There is also usually a good amount of light from the street. Friday night I lay in total darkness and silence. Well, not complete silence. Old houses are noisy at night, with bumps and creaking wood aplenty. I have an over-active imagination and couldn’t help but wonder if that clump of snow falling from a tree onto the roof was actually the footfall of someone…or something..in the attic…I stayed awake for about an hour, listening, and found that our house is never completely quiet.
The power came on at about five in the morning. I came down to the sound of a truck plowing its way down the street, hard drives spinning up on computers, the rumble of the heater and coffee pot gargling and bubbling. We take for granted the motion, light and sound of 21st century life. More to the point, we take for granted that we can control all that motion, light and sound with the flick of a switch, the press of a button or the turn of a knob. I enjoyed my sojourn back into the 19th century. But behind that enjoyment was a disquieting feeling …what would life be like day after day, without the ability to flick those switches, press those buttons and turn those knobs…
