Why Be Married? For the Hot Water

As you might have heard, the northeastern U.S. got hit with a record-breaking October snowstorm yesterday. We were right in its path.
And even though I usually overprepare for hurricanes, I didn’t do much about this freak storm, because I was supposed to pick up my mother at the airport. Instead of preparing the house, I was digging out my car. Online weather reports kept telling me it was raining, not snowing in NJ. They were saying that about where I was, too, so I wasn’t all that confident, but still I did very little to prepare for problems and focused instead of being safe on the drive to the airport and back, which included getting myself a lot closer to the airport before dark and hanging out until she landed.
So I was caught by surprise when trees began falling apart in the neighborhood. I got a little worried when the tree I park under lowered its boughs to surround my car in its own private garage with no exit. I went out and shook snow off every branch I could reach with a broom. Then the power went out and we got the call that her flight was cancelled.
We were not ready for the 22 hours that followed, without heat or electricity or—gasp!—the internet.
There we were, surrounded by candles and wearing several layers of clothing, when my husband, a genuine, certified geek, began setting up two piles of big, fat technical manuals on either side of a candle in a jar. He set a cookie cooling rack across the two piles of books (Perl, PHP, Excel, Linux, and the like). Then he set a pot of water on to boil, as if this little, apple-cinnamon-scented candle were a Bunsen burner in a chemistry lab (waving hi here to my science teacher daughter-in-law). To my delight, the water boiled, and we could have all the tea, coffee, and hot cocoa we needed to make it through a very chilly night of indoor camping.
It’s times like this that I really love being married.