off the grid

unplugged and empowered

Another power outage. The sky rumbles, ominous. A smattering of stars in blue-gray twilight.

In the flashlight’s mottled shadows, I think of my mother and how she survived various outages—our island is the last stop on an archaic power grid, after all. And how, even as dementia short-circuited her brain, she was fearless and faithful, in her beliefs; in the world itself.

I’ve been writing this story for years, a fictional dystopia of droughts and fires and outages. In the end, the characters return to a life of quiet simplicity. Windup clocks. Woodstoves. Books.

Disconnected by design. Like an island.