A Sometimes Slippery Slope

Or should I say that the ice is sometimes very thin? No. I think I’ll stick with Maslow’s hierarchies of needs; it presents a nice slope. A simple thing like a power outage—especially when you discover it at 11:30 at night, returning from a Memorial Day spent with family far from here—can plunge you straight from the dark blue into the red. And it doesn’t get easier with repetition. The last time this happened was in August of 2010. Bad transformers—then and now—with big (if spectacular) electric arcs sizzling and lighting up the night in white to orange to red flares. This one was over by 1:30 this morning, but since the last one lasted, intermittently, for better than a week, we walk about with fingers crossed.

Oh, and yes. We sometimes walk in our innocent habit-world admiring the decorations frost has formed on the branches of nearby trees, thinking exalted thoughts about beauty, symmetry, and the wonders of nature—when, suddenly, crack! And we find ourselves waist deep in water. The sublime parts of us are still sticking out, but, unfortunately, we’re right up to our “friendship, family, and sexual intimacy” in freezing nasty water.  

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Image courtesy of Wikipedia (link).