Yesterday, around 6:30 a wild thunderstorm ripped through our area. I could hear the roll of the storm above me, as heavy rain (or it could have been pea size hail) pelting our roof. I expected the crazy storm to pass in short and I didn’t give thought to what most of us dread…. a black out.
Sure enough, our electricity flickered off and then back on before it went completely off the second go around. I scurried to the bedroom to get my flashlight from my nightstand. I groped around in my drawer, “Where was that silly thing?” I came up empty-handed. I reached for the next best thing, our wind-up lantern. That thingamabob tired me out after a few minutes of cranking I just decided to snuggle on the sofa to cat napped. What else was there for me to do?
Well, it wasn’t quite dark and I definitely wasn’t alone. I had my gigantic towering soon-to-be 17-year-old son home with me. He’s home with me 24/7. That’s just goes with the territory of being a home school mom.
Anyhow, he was there to protect his little ole mother from Gremlins or other sorts of monsters lurking around the darkened corner. But, who was there to protect me from him? No one, I tell you! He had fun flipping my toes in between text messages, as I lay curled up on the cough trying my best to catch a teeny rest. I wonder if the pioneer boys did this sort of thing to their maws?
My mind drifted back a few years when all three of our kiddos were little and how much fun we would have when the power went out. It’s funny to think about it, but they loved it when we were without electricity. They liked having Beanie Weenies and Vienna Sausage for dinner. You could hear their little smiles in the dark when they’d proclaim, “Oh boy, we get to have Beanie Weenies tonight!”
Entertainment in the dark without our usual modern conveniences such as the TV didn’t matter one bit. They liked moving around in the dark with their flashlights. The evening took on a mysterious flavor for them, as they got around with only a small beam of light. It’s a good thing we didn’t have cats to get in our way or there would have been lots of stepping on tails and broken bones, not the cats bones, but the children’s or… my DH’s…or mine. LOL
Sometimes, we would simply set in the living room creating shadow silhouettes with our hands on the wall. Do you remember doing this? Would you like to see a cool hand shadow presentation? Then, click here. While, our hand shadows weren’t nearly as clever as pictured in this video, we had loads of fun trying to turn our hands’ shadow into alligators, birds, and rabbits.
Once we grew tired of chasing the silhouettes across the living room wall and ceiling, we embark on another interesting fun activity. We would see who could make different sounds the best, like a creaking door, an owl hooting, a wolf howling, … This was always a sure way of getting some good laughs.
Other times as we sat hidden in the blackness for hours, we’d settle in to listen to DH recounting true stories from his boyhood about bears in the hills of West Virginia or those his Grandma shared with him about panthers, like in my story The Tale of Ole Green Eyes. Story time in the dark on a stormy night was an adventure for the entire family.
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