It always startles me, even when – tipped off by swaying pines and limbs pelting my house – I suspect that it might happen. After a minute or two, when my heart has stopped thumping around my chest like a tennis shoe in the dryer, I begin to gather my wits and my battery-operated gadgets around me and settle in for what I hope will be a short-lived power outage.
I don’t want to brag, but I am pretty good at the settling in part. I text a few friends and neighbors to make sure I’m not the only one having all the fun, set the phone aside to conserve its battery and begin to appreciate how peaceful it is without the annoying hum of the air-conditioner and refrigerator or someone yapping at me from a television screen.
Since I got quite a bit of practice this past spring, I can now keep up that charade for nearly an hour. After that, I start twitching a little and begin to dig around in my battery bag to see if I have enough C batteries to power up my little boom box and enough D cells to use my portable fan, which in addition to stirring the air makes a comforting little humming sound.
You may be thinking that checking the battery supply is something that should be done regularly, before a power outage, and you are absolutely right. I might also remind you that nobody likes a know-it-all.
I have several flashlights and a lantern in addition to the aforementioned boom box and fan. Nearly all of them require different size batteries, which is something I will never understand. Why can’t there be a standard size battery for stuff like that? Anyway, it is what it is and, having the patience of a toddler when it comes to things like organizing batteries, I have a little trouble keeping up with such tasks.
I once had a friend who had a battery organizer with special compartments to keep the AAs from hobnobbing with the AAAs and the Cs from getting mixed up with a gang of huskier Ds. There was even a spot for those little rectangular 9 volts that don’t roll with the others and, as near as I can tell, are good only for smoke detectors.
I have lost touch with that friend, probably because we had so little in common.
I have a large canvas tote bag in which all members of the battery family mix and mingle. Most of the batteries are in their original packaging. A few never made it to the tote bag. There are some loose AAAs, rescued from a retired remote control, on a bookshelf because I figure they still have some life left and I occasionally encounter a crusty AA rolling around in my junk drawer. But most of the batteries are in the battery bag.
Digging through that bag reminds me of the D-cell anxiety I felt in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. For weeks after having survived several days without power and running low on D cells, I would pick up a package of them whenever I went to the store. Now, some of them are well past their expiration date. Are they still good? I have always taken expiration and “best by” dates with a grain of salt but, unlike a jug of milk, you cannot just give batteries a sniff test. I do not want to remove them from the package to test them, so if I see no signs of corrosion they go back in the bag. I make a mental note to buy more, just in case. That bag is getting heavy.
I also keep an ample supply of AAAs to power what became my best friend after the last couple of storms.
I don’t know about you, but I get attached to certain things during a prolonged power outage. For me, it is a small but mighty flashlight that has a wrist strap. For several days after Hurricane Ike that flashlight went everywhere I went, swinging from my wrist and sharing some of my most intimate moments. It was a tough habit to break – kind of like how you continue flipping the light switch when you enter a room days after knowing full well that the switch is useless in a power outage.
When life returned to some normalcy and I prepared to make my first post-storm trip to the grocery store, I got into the car, put the key in the ignition and noticed the flashlight dangling from my wrist. I had grabbed it instead of my purse.
During normal times, this would alarm me, as would the anxiety I felt as I went back into the house to exchange the flashlight for my purse. I won’t tell you how close I came to sticking the flashlight in the purse. “That would just be too weird, even for you,” I told myself as I left my lifeline behind on the kitchen counter. I drove to the store with the nagging feeling that I had forgotten something important.
The feeling eventually passed. Just like storms.
