My story

Lisa Stuecher

Age: 27 • Shepard Street • Lansing

A positive story: It was a silver lining for my boyfriend’s restaurant. The records showed it would be dead slow during those days but since no one had power and everyone came for breakfast. We were so busy. It was truly a blessing for us. Truly. Those surprise busy days of extra revenue really helped out with the surprise expenses of starting a new business.

 Mickey Hirten

Age: 64 • Lagoon Drive • Okemos

At 1 a.m. Christmas morning I was in my front yard refilling the gas tank on my generator. It was cold, dark and, for the moment, silent. Very solitary. Low in the eastern sky a shooting star blazed across the horizon, exploded, and shattered into short-lived streamers — a Christmas star, Biblical, even. I looked for more, hoping for a meteor shower. There were none. But for early Christmas morning, one was enough.

Stefanie Spiro Pohl

Age: 28 • Mistywood Drive • Okemos

The generator powered up in the middle of the night Saturday during the ice storm and ran for a week until our power was restored. It's a heavy duty generator and was able to run everything in the house, so we were fortunately able to still host Christmas.

Even though it was pitch black in our neighborhood, our lights were on, including our Christmas lights outside. At first we thought neighbors might think we were rubbing it in that we had power, but if people weren't going to be able to enjoy all of the Christmas lights outside last week, we felt like at least there was a little Christmas spirit with our house.

Kylie Johnson

Age: 34 • Cheltingham Boulevard • Lansing

We were fortunate enough to still have gas, so our fireplace and hot water heaters still worked. My mom, dad and I sat around the fire freezing for a while. I decided to find a game we could play. We have the original edition of Trivial Pursuit from 1981, and we bonded over answering questions and discussing how much the world has changed since 1981. We were without power for 55 hours. By the second morning my dad was getting worried about the pipes bursting. I put a message on Facebook about where to locate a generator. A friend I haven't seem since high school answered my post and helped us get a small generator. We finally had some real heat and my dad found a new appreciation for social media. The sump pump also got some power so dad was able to take a rest from bailing water out of it (around 4,000 gallons total). Throughout the short powerless time I was struck by peoples’ willingness to help and a strong sense that it was supposed to happen. It bolstered my Christmas spirit and gave my family quality time together.

Age: 31 • Hulett Road • Okemos

The outage was the first time I ever talked to that many people at the gas station that many times in a row, because we all had one big thing in common: We were filling up gas cans instead of our cars. There was a kind of sense of camaraderie.

Bonnie Tracy-faraone

Age: 50 • Moores River Drive • Lansing

(We learned a) lesson: We don't need to keep the heat as high as we typically do. We always turn it down over night and after freezing for five and a half days, it feels damn need tropical in here at 60 degrees. We need to stop consuming so much and use only what we need.

Jessica Cowles

Age: 29 • Clemens Avenue • Lansing

The first night, I bundled up, started a fire, brought my goose-down comforter downstairs and toughed it out. I slept on the floor in front of the fireplace. The next day, it was 39 degrees.
Lansing Board of Water and Light wasn't answering the phone and I was getting extremely angry. The whole street, up until about six houses south of mine, had power. My section of the street was eerily dark.

As the temperature in my house continued to fall to near freezing, I got a call from a friend of mine who said he wouldn't mind a house sitter. I packed a blanket and pillow, a change of clothes and all the Christmas gifts I still had to wrap. Christmas Day came and went, complete with Christmas dinner at a Chinese restaurant because no one had power to cook. BWL had promised power by the end of the day of Christmas, but that hope was smashed. I went to bed not knowing where I would sleep the next night.

I was awakened the next day by a text message from a friend: “I see a light on in your house.”
I've never been so happy to have a 52-degree house. I know there are still people out there who are still making it by like I did with the generosity of friends and strangers. It's a pretty neat thing to witness.