By Sara M. Berry

I have never been so happy to have to go to class as I was Friday morning. Nor have I ever been so happy to take a hot shower (in my own bathroom!) as I was Friday night. If there’s one thing we all can learn from the events of the past week, it’s how much we take the little things for granted.

As I spent the week in the dark, I realized how much I depend on things like electricity. I lost count of how many times I walked into a room and reflexively flipped the light switch, momentarily forgetting that nothing was going to happen.

Making something to eat was suddenly a lot more difficult than pushing a few buttons on the microwave. Until my iPhone died and I had no contact with the outside world, I forgot how much we rely on the internet for communication. Once my laptop died, I gave up on homework for a while before I realized that I could always use a pen and paper to write my research paper. After four days of being trapped in my house with my family before my workplace got a generator, I realized how much I took even my job for granted.

I had no electricity from Saturday night until late Friday afternoon. It seemed like I was never going to get power back. Two streets away from my house, there was power as early as Wednesday evening. Once I saw it coming, it seemed like it was taking its sweet time getting to me, and I wasn’t sure it would ever make it back to my house.

It was a long week, and by the end of it, not only did I realize how much I took everyday things like electricity and the internet for granted, I also realized how lucky I was. As I slowly regained contact with other people, I realized that many people had fared the storm far worse than I had.

As I write this, half of my town is still without power, not to mention those in other areas of the state. Once I was able to get out of my house, I saw how many trees were down. I’ve spoken with people whose houses got damaged to the point of being uninhabitable. Many more people had trees fall on their cars. I’ve seen pictures on Facebook and on the news of places where there are still trees across roads. Perhaps the most poignant story I’ve seen was the desperate mother of an asthmatic little boy no older than three come into the store where I work and ask if she could use an electrical outlet to plug in her son’s nebulizer so she could give him a breathing treatment.

Two months prior to last week’s snow storm we had Hurricane Irene. It seems to me that Irene was the polar opposite of this storm. After Irene, many people said how much the media had blown the storm out of proportion. There was certainly damage from the hurricane and people without power, but not to the extent that was predicted.

Over the last week, many people said that we should have been more prepared for this storm, that snow storms like this don’t happen in October. But there are many years that we have had snow before Halloween. And truthfully, we knew this storm was coming. Snow had been in the forecast since early in the week. But I don’t think that anyone expected the devastation that we experienced from this storm. Perhaps we were too let down by Irene to really worry about this one.

This time, we got what we seem to have wanted, and much more. In a way, we were lucky. While many of us were without power or heat for a week or more, the weather this week was rather mild. This could have happened in January. We could have been a whole lot colder.

If nothing else, we should use the experience of this past week as a lesson. We should look for a happy medium between blowing things out of proportion and underestimating them. We should realize how vulnerable we are to extreme weather conditions. We should take a moment to appreciate the little things, and to realize how lucky we really are. Because no matter what happens, things could always be worse.