Woke up yesterday morning to 6″ of snow and no power.

The snow was gorgeous. It had first fallen heavy and wet and so clung to every bare tree branch transforming stark black skeletons into bleached beauties.

Of course, these overladen branches were likely the cause of the power outage. The price of beauty.

After Bill cleared my car and shoveled the drive, I went out foraging for coffee and to see if the post chapels were preparing for Mass. The roads were fine, relatively. Plows had been plowing and the heavy snow compacted nicely. My ABS works fine, I discovered. You need to check these things every so often. But two of the post chapels had no power and the third had a pristine blanket of snow over the parking lot, which led me to believe that Mass was not happening that morning.

One Dunkin Donuts on post was without power, but the other was closed. Heaven help me, I nearly cursed. It’s one thing to cancel Mass, and quite another to close a place of business. Especially one that serves coffee by the box.

So, I went off post and the roads were fine there too. I passed a McDonalds, but it looked closed. On second glance, there were two people inside, but I had already passed it. The nearby 7 -Eleven was open, so I got coffee but they were out of donuts.

The kids were happy to learn when I got back that Mass was canceled and they could go play. Bill and I kicked around a couple of ideas about what to do about Mass. We thought about doing a prayer service, but decided on going to the 5 PM drunkard’s mass at a church off-post.

We were still without power by late morning. One of my neighbors, a southerner by birth, remarked that if the power didn’t come on “soon” the pipes might freeze.

I managed to supress the urge to laugh.

I assured him that all he had to do was turn the taps open a tiny bit and all would be fine.

By noon, the temperature in my house was about 66 degrees. That’s about 4 or 5 degrees less than I prefer to keep it. But it’s also about where I used to keep it when money was tight. It was noticeably cooler, but not even very uncomfortable. Oh yes, that’s why we invented things like sweaters.

The power kicked on at 1230 PM. It was nice to be able to make a hot cup of tea.

We left for Mass around 430 PM. Not only were the roads clear, they were DRY too.

The schools are closed today. They’re closed in New Jersey too, but NJ got 18 inches or so. I’ll have to do school really early this morning before the neighborhood kids knock on the door.