Zombies

Yesterday the power went out. The farm has a cable TV, almost everyone has a laptop or something similar, and suddenly all those things were useless. Sunday afternoon is a very mellow time on the farm, we were all tired from Hana and were watching movies, sending emails, in youtube black holes or napping. For a while, we thought it was just a short one, out in the country it happens every now and then. But after a good hour and a half, it was obvious this was a big one. Slowly but surely, we all ended up around the kitchen table. Claire and I were writing letters, Alicia was drawing, the boys debating over something. Though we all live together, it’s hard to catch the farmily in one place for more than a minute. We like our rooms and our space and our electronics, but when the power goes out in the country, it’s pitch black. And that tends to bring people together.

            We sat around the kitchen table and went back to basics. We wrote letters instead of emails and facebook, drew pictures instead of looking them up online, talked to each other, instead of into our phones. We made weird concoctions of cold food, because we have an electric stove, microwave and toaster.  The only generator was plugged into the lettuce fridge; protect the business before anything else! But Drew refused to compromise his bagel quality, and so carried the toaster outside to plug it into the generator. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

            When the sun was completely gone, we lit the only two candles we had, ate trail mix and Alicia got out her guitar. She plays for us every now and then, and it always makes my day. She has a beautiful and usual voice that can be soft and also haunting. She played through our requests, we let her sing beautifully and we sang badly together. She made up songs on the spot about different farmily members and about zombie apocalypses. The farmily is really into zombies because we’ve started watching The Walking Dead together, so anytime the power goes out, there’s a storm or we hear noises in the jungle, we all get talking about how and what we would do if the zombie apocalypse hit. The current plan is to fight our way to Lahaina and then hijack a cruise ship and use that as our fortress till the whole thing blows over. There are some flaws, like getting rid of the zombies on the ship, getting supplies and the possibility of zombie sharks, but we’re working on it.

            Chris said it best: “We should kill the power every night”. We sat together for hours, singing and laughing and eating cold food. It’s funny how simple and still complicated it is to bring people together. We live together, but to actually be together, we needed to be afraid of the dark. Try killing the power in your house for a night; when the lights are off it makes it easier to see the light that comes from the people around you.