Ice storm

It seems to me that we have had more snow than normal in this winter of 2010-11, but don't hold me to that statement, as my memory is only about 5 minutes long these days. There is one
particular storm that has stayed in my mind for many years, though.
It was the winter of 1974. It started out as a blizzard; then, if I remember correctly, it
warmed up a bit and then we had freezing rain--and an ice storm. It was a wide-spread storm
and we lost our electricity almost immediately, but not all areas did. Some regions never did
lost their power. We lived on new highway 50 east of Flora in a modular home. Thankfully, we had built a
big family room, which was attached to the double-wide. In this family room we built a
beautiful fireplace. This turned out to be very lucky for us as it was our only source of heat during the storm. We were getting ready to switch from selling RV's to selling furniture, but the furniture store
did not open until July of '75.
We only lived two houses from the electric substation, so we were smug in the knowledge that we wouldn't be without electricity too long. That turned out to be wrong. When the power
companies (and they even called in crews from all over the area) began to get the electricity up
and running, they started at the other end of the electric grid and worked their way BACK
to the substation.
The fireplace worked fairly well in keeping us warm and at night we all piled into the family
room and slept on furniture and eventually, we even pulled mattresses into that room to sleep
on. Snow had to be melted in order to flush the toilets. Food preparation was interesting,
as everything had to be prepared in the fireplace. The fireplace had no special equipment
to allow me to cook in it properly, though. I finally did get some cookies baked, but they
had scorched bottoms. None of us will ever forget that all of the food had a strange, woodsy,
smoked taste. Yuck! I had fixed a big dish of noodles before the storm hit, but none of
us could stand to eat those smoky noodles.
It was the middle of the 4th day before our electricity came back on, and what a celebration we had!
Jim vowed we would never go through that again, as he would pile us into the car and drive until we found a town with electricity and check into a motel until things returned to normal.
That experience taught us we would have been terrible pioneers.