The power went out a little after eight on a Tuesday in July, right in the middle of a storm that had been threatening all afternoon and finally made good on it, a hard crack of thunder and then every light on the street going dark at once, mine included.
I found candles in the cabinet under the sink where I keep things I never expect to need, lit two of them, and sat in my kitchen for about twenty minutes assuming this would resolve itself quickly, the way outages usually do. It didn’t. By nine it was clear this was going to be a longer night than that.
How Everyone Ended Up on My Porch
I’m honestly not sure who started it. I think Wanda came out first, unable to sit in her own dark house any longer, and made her way over because my porch light, battery powered, was the only visible source of light on the block. Then one of the Osei parents came out with the kids, who were thrilled about the outage in the way kids are thrilled about anything that disrupts a normal bedtime, and within half an hour there were six or seven of us out there, some sitting on the steps, some standing, talking by candlelight and the light of a few phones.
I don’t have a porch built for that many people. We made it work anyway, someone dragging over a folding chair from their own yard, the kids sitting cross legged on the top step passing a flashlight back and forth like it was some kind of prize.
What We Actually Talked About
Nothing important, in the grand sense. Wanda told a long story about a blackout from decades ago that lasted three days, which none of us could verify and some of us privately doubted, but which she told with such conviction that it didn’t matter whether it was exactly true. The Osei kids asked me a lot of questions about Dot, who had wisely retreated somewhere in the house and did not want any part of the gathering. Someone brought out a bag of chips that needed eating before they went stale in the heat, and we passed it around.
At some point I realized I hadn’t had a conversation with this many neighbors at once in longer than I could easily remember. Not because anyone was avoiding anyone, just because ordinary life doesn’t often put seven people from the same street in the same spot at the same time with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be.
The Storm Itself
It kept going on and off through the evening, distant flashes and the occasional close crack that made the kids shriek and then laugh at themselves for shrieking. Nobody went inside during any of it, which in retrospect probably wasn’t the wisest choice, sitting out on an open porch through an active storm, but it didn’t feel dangerous in the moment, just loud and a little thrilling in the same way it was for the kids, if I’m honest about it.
When the Lights Came Back
Power returned a little after two in the morning, all at once, every house on the street lighting up within about ten seconds of each other, and there was a small cheer from the porch, followed by a slower, almost reluctant breaking up of the group. Nobody rushed inside immediately. We sat there another few minutes in the sudden electric light, blinking a little, before people started gathering their chairs and their kids and heading back across the street.
What I Kept Thinking About Afterward
It’s a strange thing to say a power outage was one of the better nights I’ve had in a while, but I keep coming back to it. Nothing about the outage itself was pleasant. It was hot, the storm was unsettling in the moments it got close, and I lost the contents of my freezer by the time it was all over. But the six hours in between, sitting on my porch with neighbors I mostly only wave to, felt like something I don’t get enough of anymore, and I’ve caught myself, more than once since, almost wishing for another outage, which is a ridiculous thing to wish for and I know it.
What Didn’t Survive the Freezer
I lost a fair amount of food, as it turned out. Six hours doesn’t sound long enough to matter, but combined with the heat that week, everything in there had gone soft by morning, including a container of soup I’d been meaning to eat for weeks and a bag of vegetables I’d bought with good intentions I never followed through on. I threw most of it out the next day, standing over the trash can feeling a little wasteful about the whole thing, though not wasteful enough to have wished the porch gathering away in exchange for a working freezer.
Wanda offered to share some of what survived in her own freezer, since her power had apparently come back a few minutes before mine did, some quirk in how the outage resolved itself street by street. I took her up on it, more for the company of walking over to get it than for the food itself, and we ended up talking on her porch for another twenty minutes, a small coda to a night that had already given us more conversation than most weeks manage between us.