The power went out on a Tuesday and didn't come back until Friday.
By the third night, the house had gone completely quiet. My granddaughter was asleep on the couch, wrapped in two blankets, her breathing the only sound.
I sat on the floor with a dented thermos of cold coffee. It was the same thermos I'd found in a box last spring, left over from another life.
It made me think about a former teammate from college. He brought that exact same thermos to every early morning practice, winter dark thick as ink on the field.
He said it held something his mother called 'liquid patience.' I used to laugh at him.
Now I get it. Patience is what you drink when the road is dark and you don't know how long the night will last.
Around dawn the fridge hummed back to life. The lights flickered on. My granddaughter stirred and I didn't want the quiet to end.
That darkness had become a kind of holding place. A room where nothing else could reach us but the sound of our own hearts.