my family

It's Saturday night, 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm sleeping. The rest of my family, though, is standing out in the street in their nightgowns watching a downed power line arc around in the darkness. (I think it pays to have windows that face the front of the house.)

Hurricane Ernesto (or Estenardo, as Scott called it for no apparently good reason) barreled into Connecticut this weekend and took down a ton of trees, branches, and with them, power lines. We were without power all day Sunday, and well into the morning Monday. Which actually turned out to be a good thing.

My parents have city water, so there was no problem with running water. They have a gas stove, so we could heat things up. The only thing that we couldn't do was sit around and watch tv (alas), so we all headed out to the beach in Stamford and drank cocktails and watched as the maintenance crew cleaned up the beach (which was pretty impressive). Apparently the water had been all the way up to the doors of the clubhouse -- the building probably felt like it had sand in all the wrong parts of its bathing suit. We ate greasy food, talked with some friends who came by, did the NY Times crossword and just sat together and watched my sister burn in the sun.

When we got home, there was still no power, but we cooked up our dinner in the dark (eating whatever was starting to melt in the freezer, which turned out to be all the ice cream!) and ate it on the back porch, while Scott filled up the fire pot (this metal contraption specifically designed for building fires where you probably shouldn't be having fires) with all the downed branches from the yard.

And my family, in this very twenty first century setting, sat down together and watched a bonfire. We talked and laughed and watched stuff burn. We didn't fight, we didn't engage in family politics. We just sat there, together, and watched the fire.

Which, of course, prompted the lights to come back on immediately.

Luckily, though, after five minutes, the power went off again, and my parents went off to bed, and Priscilla, Scott and I sat around and burned off the rest of the wood.

I sat there and thought about what life used to be like, when it was too dark to read alone in your room, too cold to be anywhere but within the glow of the firelight. When music came from singing together. When the only opinions you got on a regular basis were those of your family. When connections with your family were so constant, so important and so regular... what did it mean to be a family then? Was it just taken for granted? Could you truly be friends with your parents or your siblings? Have family politics always been a part of life? Have they gotten better or worse, with the advent of open communication?

I don't know, and I truly can't fathom. All I do know is that I'm glad to be a part of mine, and hope I can one day find someone who can fit in as well as Scott does. Even if he can't get hurricane names right.