A recent e-mail brought notice of school and business closings due to an impending storm, which dumped about a foot of snow on the region Monday. The message also included a handy list of essentials for a storm kit.

According to the experts, the kit should include: Water and non-perishable foods for each person, AM/FM weather radio, flashlights with extra batteries and bulbs, vital medications, sleeping bags, blankets and clothing.

My own list would include a large Thermos (preferably two) of coffee, brewed in anticipation of the storm. For food, I’d select special non-perishables like a box of chocolates (high energy), quite a few Italian sandwiches, some kind of snack crackers, cheese and a candle to enhance the atmosphere. I’d have nothing canned because I couldn’t find the can opener in the dark. Candlelight only goes so far. In addition to sleeping bags and blankets, I’d add a few pillows for real storm comfort and the clothing category would definitely be straight from L.L. Bean or some other famous outdoor outfitter.

A storm to me is a good excuse to do nothing but wait it out. That means finding a couple of well-reviewed books, some light (window or artificial) and my storm pack of food.

Past storms have taught me you can’t hold a flashlight in one hand and a book in the other, if you want to turn the pages. A storm means making up sandwiches ahead of time, finding a comfortable chair with a table for your entire storm needs and making sure the portable phone is near you. Nothing is more aggravating than getting all comfy and into the third chapter of a terrifying mystery, and hearing the phone ring, five rooms away. In the dark. Under the bed. That’s when I usually discover that the comfy chair has eaten the flashlight down into the sides where the TV remote usually hides.

Waiting out a storm in this day and age is like a forced vacation. If the power goes out, I can’t use the computer and that’s all I need for an excuse to read. Most older people do not consider loss of electricity to be life-threatening and they don’t fear getting bored because of it.

In my adulthood, the only storm that even came close to the typical storm of my childhood was the ice storm. Fifty years ago, municipalities were not equipped to deal with storms as efficiently as today. Stores were few and far between. They didn’t have automatic power generators, so stocking up was something families did routinely. Fifty years ago most of us could still find a kerosene lamp. Fifty years ago it was not unusual to lose electricity for several days, several times during the year. And of course, 50 years ago we all lived without iPods, cell phones, hand-held video games and microwave ovens. A grocery shopping trip was not a daily event. We lived for years without television and during a storm, could go for weeks without newspapers. (Of course, we had the party line on the phones.)

Storms were taken for granted in the days gone by. The only unique thing about a storm in my childhood was the infrequent times school was closed. Or we got out early and were dropped off a half-mile from home, requiring us to walk and have snowball fights along the way.

From childhood I remember one big storm in (I think) February 1952 – a blizzard. So much snow, front-end loaders cleared the Windham roads and it took a long, long time. I remember in 1954, a hurricane washed out the Chute Road bridge over Colley Wright brook. That bridge had been made of enormous granite slabs and was more than 200 years old. Since then, replacement culverts have given way a few times, hurricanes or not.

Maybe it’s time for senior citizens to give a little class on how to weather the storm.