Esther the Wonder Pig: Changing the World One Heart at a Time by Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter with Caprice Crane

Author:Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter with Caprice Crane [JENKINS, STEVE / WALTER, DEREK / CRANE, CAPRICE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pets / Essays & Narratives, Cooking / Vegetarian & Vegan, Social Science / Popular Culture
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

When you think of Christmas, what comes to mind? Ornamented trees with twinkling lights? Kisses under the mistletoe? Beautifully wrapped presents? Christmas songs that started playing the day after Halloween without even giving a thought to poor Thanksgiving?

For us, it was all of that plus the complex logistical gymnastics of planning our family visits while making arrangements for the animals. We were days away from Christmas, and after our usual back-and-forth about how long we’d be away, the dates were set: We would visit Derek’s family on Christmas Eve and come back the morning of Boxing Day (December 26) to see my mom. We’d lined up Leta to watch the pets and even miraculously got our shopping done in time. Everything was going according to plan.

Until it stopped.

And by “it,” I mean everything. On December 21, three days before we planned to leave, an ice storm hit and took everything out. We lost our power, our heat—everything that makes life worth living, at least to my mind.

If you’ve never experienced an ice storm, it goes… well, the words ice and storm convey it fairly well, but the details are pretty juicy: Freezing rain coats everything. It’s insanely cold, so you’d think it would snow, but it doesn’t. It’s this bone-chilling rain that otherwise seems harmless at first. It turns everything into icicles—a beautiful winter wonderland. Make that a beautiful, dangerous winter wonderland.

Imagine the worst blizzard you’ve ever seen. Now raise the temperature a few degrees to the point where instead of snow, it’s just incredibly cold water. The water sticks to every surface, and when the icy air hits the water, it freezes. It’s actually quite lovely… until you try to move. Your driveway becomes a skating rink (people literally skated down our street that day), the roof of your house creaks from the weight of the ice shifting, and your biggest fear after that is a sunny day. That’s when things start to melt a little bit, and you don’t know what’s going to come crashing down around you.

We’d known there was a big storm coming. And as is often the case in these situations, some people were buying up all the water and canned goods at the grocery store. By contrast, we were there just picking up some watermelon for Esther. I know that sounds like a questionable decision, but we get storm warnings all the time! They rarely turn into anything major.

You hear the same thing from people who move to Florida or other places where hurricanes tend to come through. Yes, occasionally a hurricane actually endangers property and even lives. But most of the time, the hurricane just fizzles out over the water or diminishes to a tropical storm, and the only thing most people have to deal with is some heavy rain and wind. Something truly devastating, like Hurricane Katrina, is by far more the exception than the rule. Usually, it’s much ado about nothing.

So we didn’t pay much attention to this particular ice storm warning.

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