| Mrs. Murfreesboro: Earth Hour passes quickly, easily, except for tornado victims |
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By: JEANNE BRAGG, Post Columnist
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Posted: Sunday, April 5, 2009 7:27 am
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Saturday at 6:30 p.m. my husband Tommy came home and said he thought we should celebrate Earth Hour by shutting off all things electrical from 8:30-9:30.
I said, “I thought Earth Day was later in April.”
He said, “It is. This is Earth Hour.”
I wondered how we’d pass the time.
We hadn’t eaten yet, but that didn’t bother Tommy. I’m always hungry. He rarely is. So a little thing like not eating dinner wasn’t going to hamper Earth Hour chez Bragg. I could certainly afford to go without a meal, but if we decided to eat we could always have hamburgers on the gas grill, or not. I’d better hurry if I was going to defrost hamburger meat in the microwave before 8:30.
Earth Hour came and Tommy was upstairs in his office on the telephone; no problem chatting without lights. The telephone didn’t require electricity to function.
We later realized it was unfortunately about that time that the tornado came rolling into town.
I had spoken with my daughter Anne earlier in the day and she was cooking dinner for friends whose apartment had been damaged by fire. They unintentionally left a candle lit while they went out to dinner, and it damaged not only their apartment but the apartment next to them.
Candle safety is always on my mind, but since we don’t have any gas lanterns, they would have to do.
I pulled out eight candles and went through nine matches before I found one that would ignite. I resorted to the butane barbeque lighter. What did people in old days do for matches? I read on the Internet that matches, as we know them, weren’t “discovered” until 1827. Did they keep a perpetual gaslight glowing to prevent rubbing sticks together for flame? Food for thought.
It would certainly have been greener if I had turned off breaker switches, but every time I do that I encounter different problems. I rationalized that turning them off wasn’t worth only an hour of time.
The light of four candles was adequate for illuminating the kitchen and I stuck one in the bathroom and the other ones down the hallway to keep us from tripping over anything.
Tommy was upstairs, paying bills by candlelight and whistling.
I looked up and down the street to see if anyone else was observing the hour. Three houses were dark. They were either observant or gone. I’ll never know.
You have time to think when it’s dark, and I was reminded of the tornado that hit downtown Nashville in 1998 and how people went for days without electricity. Some of my family in Knoxville went for a couple of days without electricity, too. Hard to fathom in our modern world.
About a week after the tornado in Nashville, a woman wrote a letter to the editor of the Tennessean listing things she had learned from the storm. One was: “Food stays better in a cooler when ice is put ON TOP of the food instead of on the bottom.” But I loved it when she wrote: “In times of stress, some people are easier to live with than others.”
I still smile when I think about that.
Earth Hour was gone before you knew and was more novel than inconvenient for us.
Did it have any major effect?
All I can say, is probably had more effect than if no one had observed it at all.
‘Til next week. |
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