Like most of you, we’ve been spending the last few weeks limiting our activities, canceling events, making the hard decisions in hopes that we’ll avert sickness in our loved ones and in ourselves.

And then there was Easter Sunday. We woke to rain; a couple inches, and while that’s hardly uncommon here, the ground has been saturated for months. It’s spring and the leaves are bursting forth on the trees; lots more leaves than a normal year because of the plentiful rain. After the rain, the day cleared off for a bit, and while I’ve been chomping at the bit for some sunshine, we knew that would cause issues. Daytime heat would amplify a storm system that was making its way rapidly across Arkansas.

At 8 pm, we kept up our howling appointment — in the face of a storm blowing in. Within just a few minutes, we lost electricity and spent the next slow-moving minutes listening to winds howl through the trees over our house. Strong winds dislodging branches, blowing our gas grill across our patio (with a full propane tank), knocking over heavy yard furniture. Thankfully, we had no real damage; only yard cleanup.

Others had it much worse; downed trees, snapped power poles, flattened homes, loss of life. Winds at 70 to 110 miles per hour mangled much in their paths, cutting a swath through south Arkansas, as well as much of the South. Tornadoes wreaked havoc in northern Louisiana, Mississippi, and points east. I’m thankful and grateful that wasn’t us, and grieve for those who must pick up the pieces, especially during these abnormal times.

The lasting effect of storms for us, though, is that we’ve been without electricity since last Easter Sunday night. We managed a borrowed generator a day later, but it’s not something we can run all the time, and it’s enough to keep us from losing all our stored food, especially since grocery shopping is now like running a Survivor challenge. And like many Southerners, we don’t just have a refrigerator; we have one in the kitchen, another in the garage, a small fridge hubby uses at work (and brought home), and a deep freezer. To lose all that stored food would have been rough. We moved everything out of the kitchen fridge and condensed things a bit, so we’re able to keep them running. Well, that, one solitary lamp in the middle of the dining room table, and a power strip for charging technology.

We’ve essentially been camping in our own house over the last few days. When I wake up, I get up and set water on the gas stove top to heat up for coffee as well as an indirect way to heat part of the house. Hubby walks Captain Camp Dog and fills/starts the generator. I juggle taking care of my mother’s needs throughout the day, as well as shifting/maintaining the house while hubby carries on with his remote teaching duties. Resources for getting online, where I work, are a bit thin, as is time, right now. But we’re getting by. Daytime, the windows let light in; nighttime is lit by candles and kerosene lanterns. (FYI, “Candles and Lanterns” is also the universal nickname for our electric company.)

I’ve had to adapt, yet again. I’ve been eating more than I normally would, but at least staying with foods that I normally eat and not using the challenges we’ve faced as a reason to decimate pretzels. (Luckily, there are none in the house. Pretzels are my weak point, y’all. Soft or hard, doesn’t matter.) I know I have gained weight, although I haven’t weighed over the past few days, choosing not to assault my brain with too much. I know what I face when the lights come on. The quarantine will still be there, I suspect, and I’m dedicated to getting back in control of both my eating and my physical activity.

While I long for a time when things are “normal”, whatever that new normal turns out to be, I have accepted that each weird thing that happens isn’t a permanent thing. It’s another reminder and lesson that choices are often simple: either deal with the challenge or succumb to it. It would do us no good to sit here and do nothing while waiting for the power to come back on; instead, we’ve changed our routines. We’ve accepted that for a bit, things have to change. And on my particular journey, I’ve accepted that there will always be fits and starts interspersed with the times of progress. In the long run, we are ahead of the game, and that’s a good place to be.

As for me, my weight fluctuations can be frustrating, but I am dedicated to following through. I am also intensely thankful for the skills and attitude that have carried us this far; while I am forced to live entirely in the moment and roll with the punches, I am confident that we’ll soon move on to better things.