So during the day, while the Creepy Christmas Story below was denoue-ing, I heard this news item.
...When I hear "Kentucky" I tend to think of Berea, which is not such a long drive. I was sitting on this very airy little sun porch with the computer, and the thought of how half an hour without that hot-air fan that's blasting heat at me as I type would have felt, Friday or today, made me shiver.
Most houses are more solid than the sun porch is, and the news story came from Louisville, which is in a different climate zone anyway. Maybe their temperatures last night were not below zero. Fahrenheit.
And this story started to pop into my head.
"Does this make sense?" Harry Hothead asked Pastor Peter Smith. "People in Kentucky are cold. Naturally. How not. So they crank up the heat. So the power company tells them they're overburdening the system and blacks them out--"
"I don't think the power company has much of a choice at that point," murmured the pastor soothingly, "once they've built what they've built--"
"'Rolling blackouts' they're getting all day!" Harry raged. "Freezing them is what they're doing! They may be a lot of useless Kentucky Colonels that never saw combat, but they feel the cold just the same as we do. Oh, it makes my blood boil to think of those poor..."
"Don't think of it, then," the pastor advised.
"How not!" Harry hollered.
"Think about something better."
"Such as?!"
"Such as how we're going to get the Fellowship Hall set up for them. We can take three hundred." The pastor got up and walked to the front desk of the church. "Yi Yun," he said, "what's the phone number for the main TV news station in Pineville, Kentucky?" The secretary Googled it for him. The pastor went back into his office to place the call.
"We would like to invite three hundred people out for some warm Virginia hospitality," he said, typing as he went. "No, we're not particular about their denomination. Just so they don't use tobacco or alcohol or any other drugs, that's all we ask. Grandparents are particularly invited. And if they bring pets, please bring them in secure carrying cages; we cannot be responsible for any fights among animals. Nor any unvaccinated animals, either. The animals will be staying in my garage, which is not as warm as the fellowship hall. People will be free to go out and talk to their pets if they feel the need. People should bring any reading material, musical instruments, or personal supplies they need, in their cars, and a few meals' worth of whatever they can eat. There will be opportunities to warm food up; no fancy cooking."
"Three hundred!' Harry said bitterly. "How many people are there in Pineville? More than three hundred!"
"We'll take the first three hundred we get." The pastor gave his arm a little pat that was also a push. "Why don't you start setting the chairs around the tables now. Yi Yun!" He pressed "send." "Do these notes make sense to you? Well, why don't you read them to the radio stations in Pineville then."
At four o'clock the local news channel displayed the news that Pastor Smith's church had invited three hundred residents of Kentucky to wait out the cold weather in their fellowship hall.
"We can do better than that!" said the Reverend Dr. James Brown, His secretary had gone home for the day so he looked up the phone numbers for himself. "Hello? Kindly announce that when the little First Church here in Rivertown runs out of room, the big New Church here on the corner has room for a thousand more guests..."
"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!" muttered Elder John Jones. His storefront church had no secretary so he, too, placed his own calls. "Please announce that the New Reformed Church of Rivertown can take fifty people..."
"We don't want to be left behind," Bible Teacher Anne Robinson announced as her class began to take their places that evening. "I've asked them to announce that our church can offer warm hospitality to four hundred guests here in Collegetown..."
"The Pineville electric company has announced that there's no need for any more travel, which is dangerous in these conditions," spoke up Patricia Practicality.
"That's just fine," said Teacher Robinson. "Bringing our own community together can help those who most need to reduce their electric bills and the burden on our power plant."
And so no "rolling blackouts" were necessary. People watched movies, sang songs, and told stories long after some people pulled their blankets around their heads. Some people went home; some slept on the floor all night.
All through the cold weather, all the churches were full. Many people had jobs to go back to, and went back to Kentucky early in the morning. Others stayed until the thaw arrived. Local people brought extra food for them and most of them had a wonderful time, although one cat climbed out of its carrying cage and soaked the clothes of the owner who took it out to pet it in the car, and old Shirley Sharp found fault with the decor in the fellowship hall where she stayed, and Colonel Deaf kept trying to tell everyone a story about an incompetent military officer from Virginia he once knew, and nobody figured out what the point of the story was because the Colonel had forgotten to pack his teeth.
And so, although the Christmas Deep Freeze of 2022 was not remembered as a delightful event, the one after it was so remembered for a hundred years.
God Help Us Every One, especially those of us who have to be online on Christmas Day.
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