A Piedmont Porchlight Story
The lights went out just after supper. Not a flicker. Not one of those little blinks that make you reset the microwave clock. I mean… Everything. Good and dark. For about three seconds, the whole neighborhood stood perfectly still. Then somebody laughed.
Back then, losin’ electricity wasn’t the beginnin’ of a crisis. It was the beginnin’ of an evenin’. Mama struck a kitchen match. The little sulfur smell floated through the room before she lit the kerosene lamp sittin’ on top of the icebox. The soft yellow glow spread across the kitchen. Funny thing about lamplight. It doesn’t chase every shadow away. It simply makes friends with them.
Daddy stepped onto the porch. Looked up. “Transformer’s gone.” How he knew that, I never figured out. Daddies seemed to possess ways of knowin’ things the rest of us weren’t born with.
Within ten minutes, front porches all over Piedmont began glowin’. One lantern. Then another. Then another. It looked like the whole town had decided to decorate for Christmas all at once.
Somebody down the street hollered, “Y’all got lights?”
Daddy answered, “Nope.”
“Good.”
Neither one of them seemed disappointed. Children wandered from yard to yard catchin’ lightnin’ bugs. The grown-ups gathered on porches carryin’ lawn chairs and glasses of sweet tea. Without televisions competin’ for attention, people started noticin’ one another again.
Miss Willie Mae brought over a homemade pound cake. Uncle Bob arrived carryin’ a watermelon he’d been savin’ for Sunday. Somebody else produced a deck of cards that had apparently been waitin’ years for an occasion exactly like this. Before long, three different card games were underway.
Somebody started tellin’ stories. Now, there’s a dangerous thing to do in Piedmont. One story always leads to another. Mr. Kinzalow swore he’d once caught a catfish bigger than his canoe. Nobody believed him. Least of all his wife. She’d heard the tale enough times to know precisely where the fish gained another five pounds. Every time.
Children sat cross-legged on porch steps listenin’. Not because they believed every word. Because they hoped they might. A good story doesn’t have to be entirely true. It just has to be honestly told.
As darkness settled in, the sounds changed. No televisions. No radios. No air conditioners hummin’ in every window. Instead… Crickets. Tree frogs. A whip-poor-will somewhere out beyond Terrapin Creek. And, right on schedule, the long whistle of a freight train driftin’ across Dugger Mountain.
I remember thinkin’ I’d never heard the night so clearly. Then somethin’ happened that I still think about. A little girl from two houses down climbed into her daddy’s lap and asked, “When’s the ‘lectric comin’ back?” He kissed the top of her head. “I don’t know, child.” She looked around at everybody laughin’ on the porch. After a minute she smiled. “I kinda hope not yet.”
Out of the mouths of young’uns.
Around ten o’clock the streetlights blinked. Porch lamps glowed. Televisions crackled back to life. The refrigerator sighed with relief. One by one, folks stood up, stretched, and started gatherin’ their empty dishes. “Well, I reckon we’d better head on back to the house.”
The funny part was, they were already home. They’d just spent four hours rememberin’ what home sounded like. These days, if the electricity goes off, most of us reach for our phones before we reach for our neighbors. I understand. Life’s different now and convenience has spoiled us in a hundred little ways. Mine own self included.
But every now and then, I catch myself wonderin’ if maybe those old power failures gave us somethin’ worth missin’. Not the darkness. The togetherness. The permission to sit still for a while. To let conversations wander wherever they pleased. To laugh until the coffee got cold. To discover that a porch full of neighbors makes a mighty fine substitute for a hundred television channels.
I’ve come to believe that electricity powered our lights. But it was people. People powered the neighborhood. And if the lights happened to go out again tonight, I reckon I’d put the coffee on, light the old kerosene lamp, and carry a couple of extra chairs out onto the porch.
Just in case.
Because every once in a while, it takes a little darkness…
To remind us how brightly good neighbors can shine.
