As the great snow struck on Wednesday night, we happened to be sitting by the fire with Laura Ingalls Wilder. Specifically, I was reading aloud from “Little House in the Big Woods,” the first in the cycle of memoirs of life in the 1870s that is a staple of American childhood. “Laura listened to the wind in the Big Woods. All around the house the wind went crying as though it were lost in the dark and the cold. The wind sounded frightened,” went the story. The children lay listening, as candlelight flickered across their faces.

It so happened that, like the people in the story, we (and 400,000 other Pepco customers) were making do without such newfangled doohickeys as electric lights, central heating, or Wi-Fi.

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