Pumpkins and Pumpkin HEADS

I haven’t written in ages and SO much has happened.  A lot of good and pretty much a lot of bad too.

The latest event has provided me both material and motivation to blog again.  It’s what Richard termed “the Pumpkin Nor’easter” that dumped a foot of snow over us on October 30 and wiped out our power for five days now.   If you ever wanted to know what Armageddon might be like, you should have been in our town the next morning looking for a cup of coffee. 

I have decided that in addition to the list the government puts out for emergency supplies, I’m including two working bicycles.  Imagine if you couldn’t get gasoline, which was the case Sunday morning.  Imagine if you couldn’t drive down the road because of fallen wires and trees.  At least a bike might make it around these things.

Imagine if you have a mother like mine who has no cell phone, and if she did, wouldn’t know how to use it.  How could you check on her?  This leads me to what I call “the incident.”  It involves a mother, a cell phone, an emergency, and a lot of frustration and anxiety.  Here it is:

Three days into the power outage my mother still would not leave her home to stay with me, who at least had a wood burner, nor would she stay with my brother or sister who both had full power.  She preferred to sleep in her 45 degree house wearing a down coat, hat, and mittens to bed each night.  I got her a cell phone from Target so we could check on her each day and if she needed to contact someone urgently she’d have a means to do so.  She actually used it pretty well the first day she had it and assured me on the second day that she had fully charged it at the doctor’s office.  Mind you she’s been unwell for several months.  Just another added detail to this story.

It was now day four of the power outage and I could not get hold of her nor could my brother or sister.  And she had made no effort to contact us to assure us she was still with us.  I began to panic at about 9:00 am and at the urging of my co-worker called the police to swing by and check on this elderly person, my mother.  I anxiously awaited the call back from the police telling me she was either frozen dead in bed or thawed and alive.  Sure as heck, they made contact with her.  She answered the door in her sleepwear—the down coat, hat and mittens—and told the officers her phone was “not charged.”  Do I believe her??? Not sure.  But she ended up going to a temporary shelter for all of her meals that day at the suggestion of the kind officers.  She LOVED the food and the socializing. She got her power on that night, which I wonder if maybe her attire alerted the police to take some action on her behalf.

The "incident," which I will forever refer to as "the Pumpkin Head Incident," ends with me being the daughter who called the police on her mother.

When last I called her on her cell phone, it just rang and rang.  She says she can't hear it.  Do you think she pressed the wrong button and muted it by mistake?  Maybe a new company is in order:  PumpkinHead Technology.  Not bad.