Angry Mamas

a not-for-kids post

Last Monday night, a little after I’d gone to bed, the power went out. I barely noticed because I was reading an e-book in a dark room, but Richard called from the kitchen, “the power’s out!” Harriet woke up because her night light turned off. Bea (who’d just been diagnosed with the flu) kept right on sleeping.

On our forested, rural road, the electricity goes out pretty frequently—in heavy rains, strong winds, anything that might pull a tree branch down onto a power line. But it wasn’t raining, and it wasn’t windy. Soon after Richard settled Harriet, we got alerts from Duke Energy: 1200 people were affected, estimated restoration time was 1:30 AM, and the cause was “an act of public vandalism.”

We’d never gotten that message before, and it followed so closely on the Moore County substation attack on December 3 that we were a little alarmed. But soon, just minutes later, the lights flickered back on. Phew.

But also—what the heck? It remains a mystery, as Duke didn’t follow up and I didn’t see it reported in the news (too few people affected, too brief an outage). The Moore County attack, which involved high-powered weapons fired at two electrical substations, made national news as a frightening threat to critical infrastructure. It knocked out power to 45,000 homes and lasted days. It’s also a still an unsolved mystery, though many locals believe that the attack was done by anti-LGBTQ domestic terrorists, possibly Proud Boys, targeting a drag show at a local theater. The FBI is investigating, and hopefully they’ll find out who did it and arrest them soon.

I don’t think that’s what happened in Chatham County, but I told Mamie about our brief drama the next day by phone. She knew about Moore County because it made national news (if only NC could queue up something positive!) and soon lamented her own situation. "I wanted to shoot out the street light that shines in my bedroom, but now I can’t,” she said. (Mamie has a strong distaste for street lights—bad for birds, bad for sleeping.)

Mamie doesn’t have a real gun—just an air rifle for scaring away buzzards—so I wasn’t sure how she was going to accomplish this. But she’s also resourceful, so I played along.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be a terrorist!”

“You could be an eco-terrorist,” I suggested.

“Oh,” she brightened. “That’s true.”

*

Here’s the not-for-kids part of the post: I wrote a new essay, “We Were Warned,” when I was feeling pretty low about our climate crisis. I suppose I still am, though Biden’s climate bill and the recent Democratic victories (again, little good news in NC) have buoyed me somewhat. I’d love for you to read it, and the other wonderful essays and stories in the Mothers Unearthed issue of Aster(ix) Journal. Coedited by the brilliant Emily Raboteau and Tanya Shirazi, the pieces are all by writer moms, and all about our responses to climate crisis: “fear, anger and cautionary hope,” as Tanya says. Aster(ix) is a transnational feminist literary arts journal co-founded in 2013 by Angie Cruz and Adriana E. Ramírez (Angie wrote one of my favorite books of the year, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water—it would make a great gift!). Anyway, the essay is not for kids. But it is for Mamie.

Love to all of you and more from us this week… including an exciting announcement from me and Bea!

Bea has been performing this weekend in Pittsboro Youth Theater’s production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. You can still get tickets for the 1:00 and 6:30 performances today! I did feel a little nervous telling her to “break a leg.”

Since this post is not for kids, what are you feeling angry or overwhelmed about? Or what are your cautionary hopes?