I think most folks in eastern New England can agree, Irene just didn’t live up to her hype.

She drenched and flooded much of Vermont, New Hampshire and western Maine but, in Auburn,  she was darn polite — especially to the homes in my neighborhood, clustered around the western end of Granite Street in Auburn.

So here’s what’s bugging me: Why, if the storm was so mild in a heavily populated neighborhood in the fourth largest city in Maine, did it take more than three days to get my power back?

It took 74 hours to fix. Good thing, too. Everyone was starting to get a bit cranky.

Our particular outage stretched from Fern Street east to Davis. It included all of Conant Avenue, most of Orchard Street on either side of Granite, and Davis Avenue from Lake Street up.

We’re not the only ones, either. We know residents along Summer Street up from Center Street were equally dark for days. So were patches around Stevens Mill Road and on Thursday,  a full four days after Irene, there were still parts of Lewiston without power.

The mysteries of the electrical grid confound me. At night, our street looked like a dark cave surrounded by inexplicably well-lit homes just a block or two away in any direction. We’ve talked to friends all over the state, and somehow they had power just hours after the storm was spent.

We were that one string of lights on the Christmas tree that refuse to illuminate.

I told one neighbor I would have expected this in some rural part of Maine, but not in urban Auburn.

“There’s no such thing as urban in Maine ,” he said. “Maine is all rural.”

Another neighbor described herself as “unreasonably angry at Central Maine Power.”

The rest of us spent our time muttering and grumbling impotently, waiting for some sign of the fabled CMP line crews to make it to our area.

We are keeping this all in perspective: Nobody in my neighborhood was seriously harmed by this outage.

The weather was  pleasant, cool and dry — good sleeping weather. If there had to be a time for the power to go out for three days straight, this was it. We haven’t needed heat or air conditioning and most neighbors had cooking stoves or gas grills to heat up their meals.

The storm left our homes alone, thankfully. There has been no disaster here. There are no dramatic rescues that must be made, no fields of debris to pick through looking for tokens or keepsakes and no declarations of disaster are pending. Storm damage was less than you’d expect from an unheralded Nor’Easter.

A few folks, dependent on oxygen or other special home medical care, relocated to better lit areas with friends or family until the power came back and they were convinced it was back for good.

For the rest of us, it was kind of like camp —  a really bad camp. 

It’s the kind of camp where everyone still has to go to work or school the next morning and the chirping of crickets and peepers is replaced with the chainsaw drone of gasoline-powered generators.

The only thing missing from this camp, Camp Granite, was the fun.

It’s toughest for the kids, forcibly weened from their Xboxes and PlayStations, from Facebook and YouTube and from any and all television.

It’s probably good for them. That’s what one neighbor said. Her kids are unconnected and outside. Mine took to playing his acoustic guitar in the dark until he fell asleep.

But there were no hikes, no swimming in lakes or crafts to perform. We broke out the board games, playing Apples to Apples and Trivial Pursuit by candlelight. We turned in early to be ready for the next day, mostly because of boredom, not exhaustion.

The conditions were a challenge for my wife. A true gourmet cook, she had a tough time coming up with unique meals that can be cooked on a two-burner gas grill.

So, our complaints are minor and we are truly lucky. We were prepped for an outage, with candles, flashlights and plenty of batteries on the dining room table. We moved the grill to safety and filled the cooler with ice just in case. We expected something, maybe an hour or two in the dark. Maybe as many as 24 hours, but not the full three nights we got.

Despite our preparations, three nights without power was too long. The candles are almost gone and the ice has long since melted. The food it was designed to preserve spoiled and went out with the trash. The hot water in our tank ran out Tuesday morning and we’re running low on batteries.

Each night, we gathered on the corners to talk with our neighbors, to report what news we learned from our calls to CMP and to worry about winter. If mild weather knocked us this far off the grid, the looming winter is truly frightening. What’ll we do if we get knocked out for 74 hours in February, with two feet of snow on the ground? That will be a disaster.

For the most part, CMP’s people have been understanding. Most have been kind but completely non-committal. A fix could come in days, or it might wait until the weekend, they said. But the strain of so many consumer complaints began to show.

“This is your fault, you know,” one supervisor told my wife Wednesday morning. “You knew the hurricane was coming. You should have prepared properly. You should have bought a generator.”

So that’s the answer: Buy a generator because you can’t count on the power company, even in the fourth largest city in the state.

Looks like it’s going to be a cold winter.

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