Hi Guys.

You won’t have time to read this right now because you are busy serving and helping restore power to thousands of homes across Greenville County.  (And elsewhere too, of course, but I’m currently talking about my family’s little corner of the world.)

It was Saturday night – around 1 am – when the power that we absolutely take for granted stopped surging toward our house.  We didn’t know.  We were blissfully asleep and comfortable in our beds.

You probably were not afforded the same luxury.  

You were awake, preparing, watching, getting all the stuff ready – and I don’t even know what that stuff is actually.

You left your own cozy Christmas-adorned houses and your snow happy children and you loaded your gear into trucks or packed yourself into your office and you started assessing the situation, looking for remedies and making solutions.

We spent Sunday trying to stay warm, wishing our fireplace was capable of holding open flame and wondering how we would ever make it if electricity were actually kept forever from us.

I flipped the light switch or told the kids to turn on the lights and I kept forgetting – oh, right – we have no power.  The phone battery died and cold cereal tasted comfort-less and the good times of snow play were less than good when you come back into a cold house with no water and no way to flush the toilet.

(Yes, we learned a few things to be prepared for next time.  Things that we should have already known, naturally.)

On Day Two we watched your trucks monitor our roads and we saw you pull in to the driveway beside ours.  We knew there was a problem since our neighbor’s electric lines were lying on the ground.

The kids and I watched from our windows.  There were a couple of you and you made quick work of it.  The kids laughed when they saw a couple snowballs go flying as you lowered the cherry picker and loaded back up your gear and supplies.  I liked that – the camaraderie of hard work done well.

My fifteen year old daughter verbally rejoiced as she watched you finish your jobs and said out loud, “Thank goodness for people who understand how to do things that I have no clue about.  Thank goodness for people who work hard at jobs that I think sound impossible.”

I laughed.  And echoed her same words.

Thank goodness indeed.

When I checked back on the website for our area, I saw the number of people affected by our outage go down from 315 to zero.  Then I watched another little triangle drop off the map – 200 less homes without power.  And then one more – 201 homes with electricity as their friend again.

Hello showers and flushing toilets and hot dinner.  Hello work from home and electric heat and a thermostat rising above 52.

But you folks didn’t go home when our lights came back on.  We were just a tiny triangle with less than 500 homes represented.

You stayed at it.  More houses to restore.  More trees to cut down.  More roads to clear of debris and power lines.  More wire to right. More cold to endure.  Less sleep to be had.  More time away from your favorite people.

I just want to say thank you.

This family of six is grateful to be warm.  It may make us sound petty (and no doubt we are) but the mood in our house literally shifted when the lights powered back on.  It was tangible.  How frequently we forget how powerful and illuminating of a gift electricity truly is.

So – again, thank you.

And please – throw a few more snowballs tomorrow if you can!

Sincerely,

This House With the Lights On

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