Wind update - it’s now Saturday afternoon and we’re in Kentucky at Jason’s parents’ house. A house with electricity. When we left Dayton last night, we still didn’t have electricity, though most of our friends had theirs back on. This was a good place to go to unwind and not think about the disruption to our lives last week. Few people around here even knew what happened in southern Ohio last Sunday.

Just a few minutes ago I got a text from my friend who is checking our house - we have electricity!!! When we get home tomorrow, we'll be busy plugging everything back in and resetting the clocks. We also need to move everything from the cooler and the counter back into the fridge. (I took the opportunity on Wednesday to thoroughly clean out the fridge and sanitize it.) And yes, we unplugged almost everything before leaving last night. There had been reports of people who lost their computers, TVs, and alarm clocks from the electrical surge when the power is turned back on.

Yesterday as I was driving to work on Wayne, the truck two cars in front of me suddenly stopped and the driver ran across the street. He almost got hit by a car turning left onto Wayne, as did his passenger. The driver had his cell phone out and was looking at something in the tree branches sitting by the road. (All the storm debris was moved to the curbs and often blocked the sidewalks.) Suddenly I realized that there was a person, a teenager, laying on the sidewalk within the branches. He wasn’t moving and his backpack was beside him. I drove by knowing the men from the air duct cleaning truck would make sure the boy was alright.

I called Jason right away and told him I saw something disturbing. Teens don’t suddenly collapse on the sidewalk. Was he hit? Shot? When I got to work I checked the local news sites and they didn’t have anything at first. Later I finally found one site that reported that a Dayton teenager had been hit by a car and had died. The truck that hit the boy didn’t even stop. It was just so sad and suddenly not having electricity didn’t seem so important. Later I noticed that all the Dayton news sites were carrying the story and little by little they were getting more information. They had a description of the truck, but still had not identified the driver.

Later in the afternoon I checked a couple of the news sites again, to see if they had found the driver, and I couldn’t believe what I read. The teen did not die, he was in critical condition! Somehow the police and the school had passed along the wrong information. A few of us were following the story and we were so excited that he was still alive - and we don’t even know the boy! So now we’re praying that he makes a full recovery!

Here’s the entire story.