If Our Neighbors Didn't Hate Us Before Tonight...

...they might now.

I could have also titled this post, My Husband is Superman, but we'll get to that later.

In the middle of preparing dinner and encouraging naked children to clothe themselves post-bathing, our house went dark and silent. The refrigerator stopped humming, the heat stopped running, dinner stopped cooking. Blackout.

Even more troubling, a quick glance out the windows showed me that we were the only house on the block that was dark. Across the street Christmas lights still twinkled, our neighbor's on both sides were all aglow. It was only us.

Now, in the past month, I have handed all bills and financial woes over to my husband. The sheer stress of trying (and failing) to balance our meager budget was making me ill. And so my very first thought upon seeing the rest of the neighborhood alit whilst I was toiling away in the dark with naked child bottoms scurrying and squealing past my legs, was that someone (not naming names here) had forgotten to pay the nice electric people their due and now we were in trouble.

Not the case. A quick call to my husband at work revealed that our account is in good order. Next thought? Did we trip the breaker or blow a fuse or whatever it's called when you have the Christmas tree, stove, lights, pellet stove, heater, dryer, etc, etc, all blowing through electricity like it's going out of style?

Husband explained where to check and how. Still black.

While we waited for him to phone the electric company, the kids and I lit candles and sang Christmas Carols. Asher, who had been slumbering when the house went dark, decided that being awake and into everything would be much more fun, especially in the dim lighting with the chance that he might, if he played his cards just right, be able to start a fire.

All this to say, my hands were full.

Turns out, there is a breaker box outside our house, the electrical people finally informed us (upon our second or third call in). I set out into the dark night and crunched over the snow crusted yard to check things out. Sure enough, there was another "Master" breaker right out there for anyone to stop by and mess with. And so, I clicked it off. Waited a beat. Clicked it back on. Turned to our house, still dark. Tried it again. And again. Nope, still dark.

Husband decided to come home from work to see if he could figure things out. Half an hour later and seven Christmas Carols down, he arrived, poked his head in the door and asked, "Did you do the box closest to the road, or the one closer to the yard?"

It was the one facing our yard, I told him.

He had tried it too before coming in. Only, he, being a guy, who likes to understand what buttons and switches and knobs do - what they connect to, how things are wired, what will be the effect of the cause, etc, etc - he was wise enough to look both ways when clicking on and off that switch. And he noticed that in our efforts, we had been actually turning OFF and ON the electricity going to our neighbors house.

Less than a minute later, he was back out by the road and had our house up and running in the flick of a switch.

In the end, the kids and I got to make candle lit memories, our neighbors probably wound up calling the electric company to complain and my kids are all further convinced that their father is a superhero, capable of all things. And I am too.

My Childhood Home

The ever-amazing Owlhaven (mother of ten and writer extraordinaire) has posted a call for stories about our childhood homes. To read her own story, click here.

If you post your own, let her (and I), know.





Outside

Our house was brown when we moved in, a two storied chocolate colored house perched at the top of a hill. Its windows were flanked with pale yellow shutters. The sloped driveway led to a tall pile of concrete steps. A workout just to reach the front door. The whole side yard was a hill, creating the perfect course for sledding in the winter.

There was an old birch tree at the edge of the lawn, pressed beside the neighbors chain linked fence. Beneath the tree, my sister and I would sit pulling up violets and smelling sweet, shiny tea leaves. When the lawn was neglected at the end of the summer, we'd lay in it, hidden between the tall stalks of browned grass, staring at the sky and waiting for the street lights to click on overhead.

Our backyard was shadowed by the house and lined with shrubbery and mounds of browned leaves. There were wild blueberry bushes - we'd pluck tart berries to bring in for pancakes, or to sit on the piano shaped rock and eat from our dirty palms.

In the winter, we could see clear through the bare trees into the backyards of the houses the next street over. In the summer, we did shows - performances with neighborhood children. Songs. Puppets. Crafts. We hung signs around the neighborhood. Offered snacks, Kool-aid.

Inside

First upon walking through the front door was the cream colored living room. The sunlight from the picture window was cut into the curved shape of the drapes and fell on the floor like a bright white Christmas tree on our carpet. We laid on it on Saturday mornings, belly down and playing Atari 800.

The picture window came to be marked with cat-nose prints and spotted with paw-marks. It's where Smokey, our cat, would come to let us know he had returned from his adventures, in the woods across the street. The woods where we once lost him - wandered for hours calling his name, until dusk was falling and we had to go in. Had to give up. And only then did his meek cry appear, his thin little body came from the edge of the forest, running toward us, running home.

The staircase was where we came running on holiday mornings - Christmas, we sat at the top stop, plotting our grand entrance. Cartwheels, songs, perhaps a dance. All on film now. Us, swishing in new bathrobes and pajama's, wild with bedhead and eyes wide with Christmas morning excitement.

The kitchen was carpeted for years - a thin, green and brown speckled monstrosity that stretched from dining room to family room. It was on that carpet that I first knelt and prayed for Christ, earnestly, and without simply repeating the prayer of another.

In the laundry hallway is where Smokey was brought when he first arrived, and where he stayed in a cardboard box - until he was brave enough to explore. Brave enough to be put in a plastic pink Easter basket and held up in the bedroom I shared with my sister - held up to see the posters of other kitties, just like him - and didn't that make him feel more at home?

Our bedroom was our clubhouse, where we charged our little brother an entrance fee. Where we hid a dying bunny in our desk drawer. Where we danced on our beds and hung posters of the singer's we skated to at the local roller rink. It was where I stuffed Barbie dolls down beside my bed and pulled them out after lights out to put shows for my sister. Stories.

Down the hall was the computer room - and there at the pressed-wood desk I would sit and learn to love the feel of my fingers on the keyboard, learn to create worlds out of words, and lose myself for entire afternoons.

It's the room I think of most often, the room I go back to when I start a story. I'm again surrounded by the cool mint-green walls. Sunlight spills through a smudged window and over my shoulder. I hear neighborhood children yelling and playing in the streets. I feel the keys beneath my fingertips. And I'm home.

Contents

The box is Italian and when opened it sings Edelweiss. On our honeymoon, I found myself hunting for the perfect one. One with the combination of shape, design, color and music that I wanted to bring home with me as a souvenir. But it was surprisingly difficult and we came home empty handed.

Six months later, we spent Christmas morning in our 500-square foot apartment just south of Boston, knelt side-by-side in front of a two-foot tall tree in a pot, decorated with miniature bows by the people at our local Home Depot. And my husband surprised me with this:

He even requested that they change the tune when he couldn't find exactly what we'd looked for. The ironic thing is that I don't even wear much jewelry - don't even keep my wedding rings in the box. (I keep those on a wooden fruit stand from Guatemala that's beside our stove - the obvious place for one's most expensive jewelry.)

And so when I came across a Meme (while procrastinating, of course) that asks you to open your jewelry box to the world, I thought it was inapplicable to me. But still, I opened the box - if only to listen to Edelweiss.

Here is what I saw:

Contents, originally uploaded by Mellahoney.

It was more like a memory box than a jewelry box, though most of the contents are 'jewelry', I suppose, most have some specific memory attached. The watch in the center was a hand-me-down gift from my aunt just days before I left for Romania, for example. You can click on the picture for details about the rest of the objects in my box - there are notes attached.