Long Powerless Night

My friends were over for dinner the night the storm hit. We were sitting around the computer while my wife was showing some recent work she had done for a magazine at the church. While everyone looked at her work on the screen, the lights blinked once and the monitor appeared to loose power. We looked around at each other and then darkness. We were in the back of the house away from the windows looking at each other in the complete darkness.
"what happened?" I asked. I had no idea how we lost power.
"the ice is too heavy for the lines. I bet some limbs knocked the lines out," my friend Todd told me.
I had grown up in an area of the country that often freezes and gets a couple of good snow storms a year, and yet I could never remember power going out because of ice. Tornadoes are a somewhat regular problem in the spring months, and power often goes out because of lightening and wind. But ice?
Our friends stayed for another hour or so and we talked by firelight and candlelight the rest of the night.
After they left and we went to bed in our cold house with quilts and blankets piled high on us. All night long as we lay in bed we heard crashes as ice and tree limbs hit against the house and the deck.
Our night followed the following pattern: out in the cold darkness, the ice would shutter and fall. The dog would wake up violently and bark. My wife would put her body as close she could to mine. We would fall back asleep.