Our friend
IT WASN’T SUPPOSED to be quite like this. We were supposed to launch this little project, and gather steam week by week, enticing our readers with more and more tales of sisterly devotion (or dysfunction.) Three weeks in, we felt pretty good–you were reading; discussions were happening; topics we hadn’t thought to cover arose spontaneously and took on their own lives. Week 4 was supposed to be even better–we had momentum, we thought.
And then.
You see, we four founding TSP sisters live in a beautiful, but unforgiving part of the country. We are all close enough to drive to meet, but far enough away that we often gather via Skype, rather than in person. The beauty, of course, of telecommuting, and telemeeting, is that real distance doesn’t matter, as long as the bits and bytes keep flowing. It turns out that enough ice can stop that flow dead in its tracks.
Our region (western Massachusetts, and the Hudson Valley and Capital region of upstate New York) was hit with a humdinger of an ice storm 10 days ago. We were warned, but the weather here is changeable, and dire predictions don’t always come to pass. Plus, as a recent returnee to the Northeast, the truth is, I didn’t really have any idea what “ice storm” meant (besides being the title of one of my favorite films.)
It turns out that what it means is this: trees that look like they’ve been snapped off halfway up their trunks by an angry, perhaps drunk, giant. Roads so slick that your car slides–hopefully gracefully–down your hill, rather than pausing to turn into your driveway. School is canceled. And the power goes out.
For me and Marion Roach Smith, living an hour or so apart in very different communities (hers a bit more suburban, mine decidedly rural) this meant no power for days. I am fortunate to have a generator, which gave me some electricity, but more important, heat and water (no city water here: we draw from a well with, you guessed it, an electric pump). Marion wasn’t so lucky–without supplemental power, about all she could do was drain her pipes and hope for the best.
Ironically, Margaret, whose home is arguably in the most remote location, never lost power at all. She just had to wonder why her partners-in-crime had gone (quite literally) off the grid and off the radar, incommunicado and unable to tend to our newborn sister-site. And she was powerless to help us.
As it turns out, both of our families emerged relatively unscathed (and with good stories to tell, always the upside of adversity for writers). The day after the storm was the most beautiful I’ve experienced to date in this beautiful part of the world I call home. We hope you’ll understand our absence–isn’t that what sisters do?
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