Last December, on a night so cold the wind cut right through your coat, the power went out across our neighborhood. Within twenty minutes, the doors of St. Dimitri’s Orthodox Church and the Al-Huda Mosque over on Cedar Avenue were propped wide open. No phone calls. No mass texts. People just came. The church basement…

I remember the winter of ’98 like I can still feel the cold in my fingers. The ice came in the night—gorgeous, lethal, coating every power line until the whole neighborhood sagged into a frozen silence. My apartment went dark and cold within hours. I sat under a pile of blankets, listening to the creak…

The first time my building lost power during a nasty winter storm, I remember the cold creeping into every corner of the apartment before I even found the candles. My kids burrowed under blankets, little more than lumps of wool and worry. I felt completely on my own—until the bells from St. Mary’s started ringing…

I remember the first time I really understood what a sanctuary was. It wasn’t in a book or a sermon. It was the winter of 2019, when the boiler in our apartment building died and stayed dead for six days. Outside, the temperature dropped to minus twenty. Inside, we could see our breath. Klara, an…

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over a neighborhood when the power goes out. I remember it from the big blackout a few winters ago. The refrigerators stopped humming. The streetlights went dark. But within twenty minutes, two sounds broke through: the creak of the heavy wooden door at St. George’s, and the…