The Winter Storm
By Michelle Vu, Irving, Texas, U.S.
Wake up, brush my teeth, turn my computer on, and "attend" class. Every single day, I follow the same routine as a college student. My time is spent primarily on finishing assignments for my classes. Sometimes it gets overwhelming, trying to meet the deadlines. Although I find the virtual modality highly discouraging and hard to learn from, it's something I’ve had to learn to get used to.
Practically, out of nowhere, snowfall hits. I wake up one morning, and there is a white blanket draped over the landscape. At first, I felt ecstatic to be able to play in the snow for once.
Hours pass by and it is still snowing. Night comes on, and I'm still doing homework when everything just goes dark. The power cuts out because of the winter weather. I decide to just call it a night and hope that it gets fixed by morning.
When I wake up, there is no noise, there are no lights, nothing. The power is still off. It took another six hours for our appliances to start running again. But that was for less than an hour. Granted, it was better than nothing at all. My family ran around charging up flashlights, phones, and batteries for good reason. We dealt with rotating outages for two days, only getting power for small intervals of time. Even if the power randomly came back on at 3 in the morning, we all got up and started preparing to lose it again.
None of us knew how long we would be without power. We were essentially trapped in our own house, not only by the pandemic, but by the ice as well. Each time the power shut off, it wouldn't take long for the house to start feeling like a cooler. We really had no other source of warmth, aside from piling on as many blankets as we could and lighting what candles we had left in our house.
It was through this experience that I've grown closer to my family. Even though it was dreadful to lose power in single digit temperatures, I was able to spend more time with them. We helped each other through the challenges the winter weather brought to us. We had to find solutions to simple tasks, like making food without any electricity.
At the end of the day, we all played together in the snow and built snowmen for the first time ever.