The Tears of the Lion

A winter storm moved through our area early in the Thanksgiving week, bringing five inches of snow, followed by freezing rain and ice. Conditions worsened Tuesday night, and it turned into a major ice event, making the roads treacherous and taking out our power at about 10:30 that night.

The power flickered back on, and then off for good, just before 2 in the morning. Our smoke detector is wired into our electrical system, so when the power goes back on, it emits a loud, shrill noise, guaranteed to wake the whole house. My husband reported that we had part of a tree down on the deck. To say I got a poor night's sleep might be putting it mildly.

On Tuesday morning when I got up, we got out an old-fashioned, battery-operated radio to find out if I would have work. It turns out that Penn State was operating on schedule, and so I got ready for work by the light of the headlamp that I usually use for backpacking (you can see a photo of me wearing this in my profile picture), which totally flipped out the cat!

I caught the bus in the dark on a slushy, icy road, and we made our way into town. I was able to spend a little time taking pictures on our practically deserted campus in the icy drizzle. I took many photos, while carefully sheltering my camera and myself under my bright red umbrella.

When I made my way to the Nittany Lion Shrine, as I drew closer, I saw something I had never seen before. The statue was covered in rivulets of ice that looked like tears in the rain. This is one of the many photos I took. I have taken hundreds of photos of the lion statue over the years, but have never seen it look like this before. I wonder if I will ever again in my life see it looking exactly like this.

From there, I caught another bus to my office. My husband had found an old phone that would still work without electricity, and he phoned me several times to provide updates on the situation at the house. He reported that the cat, stressed out by the whole situation, took to bed early, taking refuge under his favorite blankie.

My husband and I agreed not to open the fridge or freezer, as we wanted to maximize the amount of time we had before things turned into crisis mode with a truly alarming amount of food we had bought, in anticipation of the holiday, in the past two weeks.

He shoveled the drive way twice, hand-sawed the fallen tree limbs and removed them, made hot coffee and then later bean soup on a camp stove on the front porch, and then reported sadly by about 1 pm that it was too cold and he would soon have to crawl into his down sleeping bag to stay warm, even inside the house. And wasn't it lucky that we, as backpackers, had the gear to withstand this type of situation.

At work, I had heat and light and Internet. So I reported our power outage first thing in the morning - the Web site revealed that thousands of people in our area were out. The local township office sent e-mail updates, telling us that in some areas, the power would be back on in a few hours, but in others, they were aiming for midnight. The prospects of having a happy Thanksgiving started to look slim.

But I got back to my office at 2:30 after a meeting, to find a voice mail message from my husband, informing me that the power was back on! Hooray! I would arrive home from work to find heat, light, and all of our favorite entertainments available. We were behind on cooking and baking, though, and so we called family and rearranged schedules, moving our visit to Friday instead of the actual Thursday Thanksgiving holiday.

To add to the drama, I ordered myself a brand new camera on Friday (hooray! more on that later). And when I checked the UPS shipping link on my order, it indicated my camera would be arriving sometime on this day. When I got home at 5 pm, it hadn't arrived yet. We knew by that point that we were hoping to move our family celebration to Friday, but worried about going away for the day, if the camera might be delivered on that day instead. So we fretted. It got dark. All the ice and snow froze. Temperatures dropped.

But at 7:30 pm, there was a knock on the door. And guess what: my camera had arrived! Hooray! So we ended the day with heat, and light, and electricity, and my camera in hand, looking forward to a happy Thanksgiving!

And here is where I'd like to wish a great big Happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers. I am posting this blip on Thanksgiving day afternoon, surrounded by heat and light and good food. And I find myself especially grateful on this day for the everyday things that I often take for granted. May your life provide many, many things to be thankful for! And may you cultivate a grateful heart, all year long . . .

The soundtrack to accompany this photo . . . One of my very favorite scenes in any movie is the "tears in the rain" scene from Bladerunner, starring Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford, that occurs near the end of the film. As soon as I saw the lion, with its icy "tears," I just knew I had to include that reference in my blip somewhere. And so I am providing links to both the scene in the film that includes Hauer's marvelous speech, as well as the Vangelis song, Tears in the Rain.