The Iceman Commeth

YEA! I’m back!

It’s been three weeks since the ice storm. Oh yeah, I mean THE ICE STORM. And our lives have been upside down and turned around since then.

Three weeks ago a huge storm system pelted our picturesque town with freezing rain all night. I awoke to see this beautiful sight of my backyard.The rain continued all day. About 11:00 in the morning we lost power including our home telephone and the pump that drives our well which gives us running water. In the late afternoon we began to hear snapping of tree branches. The icy drops continued to fall from the dark sky and accumulate on everything in sight.

Night came in the late afternoon. We had small pools of light thanks to all my scented candles strategically placed. Still, reading was tough by candlelight and bedtime came early.

It was an eerie night. The absolute, velvet-black surrounded us. There was no shadows, no soft glow of red, blue and green electronic reminders of power and time. The sound of creaking and cracking branches breaking and falling under the weight of ice continued all night.

The next morning I looked out the window to our backyard, the sight was not so beautiful as before, but equally breathtaking.Fallen tree limbs crossed our driveway making us captive in our dark little cocoon, which was getting colder by the minute. There was no signal for our cell phones. We could tune to our local TV station on our battery-powered radio. All day we heard updates of power outages and blocked roads.

This ICE STORM has been the most devastating natural disaster in our area since “the flood of 1937.” We have crews from all over who have come to help replace thousands of telephone poles, restore power to tens of thousands of customers, work on cable and telephone lines. The linemen have been working 16 hour days for three weeks, and there is still work to be done.


Every time I go down a street for the first time since THE ICE STORM I am astounded anew by the mess I see. There are mounds and mounds of debris piled one after another on the curb in some areas. In other yards the chaos of fallen limbs and branches remain as they fell. It is as if the task of gathering the limbs, branches, sticks, twigs and other tree-shrapnel is so overwhelming the homeowners can’t bring themselves to begin.




Here are some numbers from THE ICE STORM for my family.
9 days without power and running water in our home.
3 days without cell service.
5 nights in a hotel - thanks very much to Phil’s company!
22 days without cable and internet service.
1 happy family to have all our conveniences restored!