Letters Home #31 💌

Writing from: Banff, Alberta

Dear Ones —

This letter comes to you on a warm January day where the sky is finally showing a bit of blue. There truly is a blue sky behind every storm and weather system. We’ve been hibernating here in Alberta where the temperatures last week dipped to -40ºC for several days in a row. The government sent a text message asking people to reduce their electricity consumption for fear the grid would be too overwhelmed. I then told my eldest daughter the story of the Northeast blackout of 2003, and felt rather old.

I remember I was still living in Ottawa. It was the summer before I started university and I was tasked with picking my sister up from her job downtown, right around 4:10pm. I drove there just fine, pulled in to pick her up and left to drive back exactly the same way. But, suddenly, everything was different. In those 20 seconds it took for me to pull over and for her to get into the car, a widespread blackout had knocked out all the traffic lights. We found out later just how wi…