May 22--Dear Elder: Powerless

Here is the letter written Tuesday morning May 22;

Dear Elder,

Hi! How are you? How was your Monday? I hope it was a wonderful day.

Truthfully, my Monday was not so wonderful. The plan was to send you a letter, do the laundry, sew stuff for girl’s camp, and do the finances. What do all these things have in common? They all take electricity. Yep. Electricity is a beautiful thing, a thing we didn’t have from 10 am to 5 pm yesterday. Someone ran into a telephone pole and the power was out not only here, but at many schools including Kat and Thom’s school. Maybe I should have taken them home, but I didn’t. I had enough trouble at home.

You see, electricity is necessary for one other thing, it is necessary in order to work Grandma’s bed. When the power went out, the head of Grandma’s bed was up pretty high and couldn’t go down without power. With the head up, I couldn’t change her. Also, the air mattress that cushions her body turned off, and her bed got pretty hard, especially sitting almost straight up. And lastly, her TV was of course off, and she had nothing to get her mind off things except my company which isn’t all that exciting. By lunch time, Grandma was pretty uncomfortable, so I moved her to her chair to change her pressure points.

At that point ,with all the hardships of her day, Grandma started crying. She asked me to call the Bishop, the Relief Society, the National Guard—basically anyone more competent than me. I listened and consoled until I got tired and then I fell asleep. At some point, Grandma fell asleep, too, and that ‘s the way we spent our afternoon.

In the evening, We loaded up all the clothes in the house and took them and Miriam and Thomas to the Laundry where Dad was working. Katrina was also working there in town. She joined us shortly. So our family home evening consisted of doing laundry and eating pizza, and that was our day. Whew! Sorry for the long crazy narrative.

Dad said he got a call from Jonathan yesterday and that the sales and the installing teams are both going to Calgary where they should be getting more jobs. So that should give Jon more work which is good.

I haven’t heard from Cass and fam, and I hope they are doing well.

Love you, Hon. Love, Mom