Habits are mighty hard to break. I flicked on switches every time I
walked into a dark room when the electricity went out last week. It was
even harder to realize some of those charming, decorative pieces in our
house were actually functioning sources of light.
But I wasn’t thinking of them, when I went to the late opening
department store with freshly restored electricity late Wednesday
afternoon. I was thinking about flashlights and batteries. Our supply of
Y2K flashlights and batteries all slowly, mysteriously, disappeared
after the false alarm of the new year.
I did not relish spending the evening feeling my way around our
cluttered house. My husband is in the middle a pre-Christmas remodeling
project with all the bedrooms disrupted and the rest of the house
overflowing with stuff we put there, “just until we get the bedrooms
freshly painted and re-carpeted.”
My son spent his time off work on Wednesday sitting by the window,
wrapped up in a warm fuzzy blanket, a lit emergency candle nearby for
warming his hands. He wanted a flashlight for the long hours of dark
after sunset.
I was bumbling through the store looking for batteries and spare
flashlights when I noticed another customer carrying an old fashion oil
lantern. That was an option I had never considered. The last lantern was
taken just as I found the display, but I did get an oil lamp and a large
bottle of oil.
With a camp stove to warm our supper, we feasted that night at an oil
lamp lit table. Afterwards, my son and I walked down the street
surveying the damage and the few dully lit homes. We stopped at a
friend’s house. They had lights, lots of lights: All the decorative
candles they had gathered over the years.
Well, duhhh… Why wasn’t I using more candles than just the emergency
candIes I found last week when re-organizing. We have decorative candles
everywhere: On the piano, the desk, the display shelves and the walls.
I went home and lit the 18 decorative candles in our great room and
foyer. With the new oil lamp, and a couple of working flashlights I
found jammed in junk drawers, we were much better off than I had
originally thought we were.
We sat there admiring the warm glow of the new lamp and old candles,
including the four candles on top of the display case with our family
antiques.
Well, duhhh… again. Behind the four candles were a couple dusty,
antique, oil lamps with wicks and glass chimneys. They only needed to be
filled with the oil I had purchased at the department store that
afternoon.
I picked up the smallest, wet the wick with oil, filled the lamp, lit
it, and carried it to my bedroom. I only reached for the light switch
once ? when I opened the linen closet in search of flannel sheets to
help warm our bed that night.
I may have found more than one way to light a room, but oil lamps and
candles fall far short of one electric bulb at the top of a closet.
Switching on electric lights is one habit I happily resumed when the
electricity was restored.