Glenda Ashworth, I was about to learn, had noticed it and had decided it meant something else entirely.
II.
I should explain how a woman ends up living in a house with no meter in a subdivision with a property owners association and a cartoon bluebonnet logo. It isn't the most natural combination.
I started at Blanco Ridge Electric in 1991, when I was twenty-two and the guys on the crew still had a betting pool on how long I'd last. I lasted thirty-one years: groundhand, apprentice, journeyman lineworker, and crew foreman for the last nine. I've worked hot sticks on a 14.4 kV line in a hundred and eight degrees. I've been on storm crews after hurricanes on the coast and ice storms in the Panhandle. I've sat in a bucket at three in the morning in sideways rain while somebody's porch light came back on underneath me, and the family came out on the porch and waved, and I waved back, and I want you to understand that there is no feeling quite like it. There is no feeling like being the reason the lights come back.
In February of 2021, there was a winter storm. If you live in Texas, you don't need me to tell you which one. If you don't, I'll just say the state's grid came within minutes of a total collapse, millions of people lost power for days in temperatures that hadn't been seen in a generation, and somewhere north of two hundred people died, a lot of them from the cold, in their own homes.
My father was one of them.
His name was Leif Sundquist, and he was a retired machinist who lived alone in a little brick house in Waco with a wood shop in the garage and a parakeet named Pipsqueak. He was eighty-three. He was stubborn and proud and he'd survived a lot worse than a cold snap, by his own account. I talked to him on the Sunday night when the outages started, and he told me he had plenty of blankets and plenty of canned soup and that I should stop worrying about him and go do my job.
So I did my job. I was in a bucket truck in Hays County for most of the next four days, working twenty-hour shifts, cutting iced-over limbs off lines and re-fusing transformers in the dark while my fingers lost feeling through two pairs of gloves, getting the lights back on for strangers. I tried to call him on Tuesday and the call didn't go through. The cell towers were down half the time. I tried Wednesday. On Thursday, a neighbor of his, a nice young man who'd promised me he'd check on Dad, called and told me.
They said it was hypothermia, made worse by his heart. They said he probably went in his sleep. They said a lot of things. The house had been at thirty-eight degrees when they found him. Pipsqueak the parakeet had died too.
I'm not telling you this to make you sad. I'm telling you because it's the reason for everything else. I spent four days keeping the lights on for people I didn't know, two hundred miles from the one person whose lights I should have been keeping on. That's not a rational thing to feel guilty about, and I had a counselor for most of a year who was very kind about telling me so. But you don't get to choose what you feel guilty about. You only get to choose what you do with it.
What I did with it was retire, a year early, and build a house that would never depend on anybody's switch but mine.
I bought the lot in Bluebonnet Trace in the fall of 2021, a new-construction spec house with a good south-facing roof, inside the city limits of Calder Springs, about forty minutes outside Austin. I did not particularly like that it had an HOA. But all the new houses in that part of the county had HOAs, and I'd worn a hard hat for thirty-one years. I figured I could handle a property owners association.