Spring storm lines don’t always knock you flat. Most days they just reach in and tap the breakers—lights blink, clocks forget the time, the router sulks. The interruption lasts seconds and still manages to reset anything that didn’t ask to be rebooted.
Prepared isn’t bunker gear; it’s small redundancies. A cheap surge strip keeps one tantrum from spreading. A battery pack turns a dead phone into an ordinary inconvenience. A headlamp where you can find it beats a drawer full of candles you can’t. If you work from home, a small UPS buys five honest minutes to save files and close the laptop like a grown-up.
Food safety is a discipline of restraint: keep the refrigerator closed, make the meal plan match the weather, don’t open the freezer to “check.” If the outage graduates from a flicker to an hour, a thermometer tells you the truth better than your optimism will.
Neighbors often decide whether it stays a nuisance: someone texts that a crew is on the block; someone else shares an extension cord to give a CPAP or modem a little mercy. The grid is an agreement, not a guarantee. Spring reminds us to keep our end—modest backups, a plan for the brief dark, and enough patience to last to the click and hum.