December 7

During the last December ice storm, the majority of town went without power for a week, and the roads were nearly impassable for several days because of downed trees and limbs by the hundreds. The morning after, the building gray light revealed Grove Street as an almost unrecognizable stretch, everything covered in ice shards that glistened, save for the debris that continued to fall from the trees.

We were without power for eight days, living in our fireplace room to be near the wood stove, using candle light in the evenings to move about or to simply pass the time, and we daily gathered water from the Artesian spring in the woods near the college. All the while the town worked throughout to clear the roads of debris, using the field parking lot as a staging area for placing the piles of limbs and full trees, stacked well high of fifteen feet and the length of a football field.