Shattered Lives

 

by Pa Rock

Kibitzer 

Our area of the Ozarks suffered massive winds all day last Friday, and several tornadoes that evening.  My little place suffered no physical damage, and for that I am grateful, but many of my friends and neighbors were not so lucky.

My only loss was the wifi connection at my house which went out just before daylight on Saturday morning.   I know that because my bedside alarm, which is controlled by Alexa, went off at its regular 5:15 a.m. time that day, but then when I asked Alexa for the morning news update a few minutes later, she was no longer connected to wifi.  It stayed off for two full days, coming back on Monday morning.  

Not being connected to the rest of thr world through wifi is damned inconvenient.   Something which I had not even heard of thirty years ago is now so central to my life that I felt lost and helpless without it.  My routines were upended.  My alarms and news updates were gone, so was the ability to surf the internet and type the daily blog updates.  There was no music during the day, nor any television to fall asleep in front of in the evenings.  I was shocked at how dependent I have become on wifi.

Not having internet service had wrecked my life, or so I thought until I got out and about yesterday and started hearing from others - those who had suffered real hardships.  I talked to people with damaged homes, people who knew others who had lost their homes entirely, people whose electrical service was down and they had no idea when it would be restored, some whose yards had been stripped of trees and outbuildings, and many who were obviously still shell-shocked at the violent destruction which had suddenly upended their lives.

There were stories of fear and anxiety and desperation, of freezers filled with spoiled meat, of uprooted trees blocking roads and driveways, of downed power lines, of keepsakes which had blown away, of shattered lives. 

It will be awhile before things get anywhere near back to normal in this area.

My internet outage wasn't even worthy of a mention, so I kept it to myself.