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The lights dim at four.
Not off. Just down. The fridge drops its hum. The kettle takes an extra minute. Twenty minutes later the town comes back up like nothing happened.
I'm the one who picks the hour.
My title is load steward. Tar River Electric gave me the job six years ago, right after the co-op bought its own wires back. I sit in a room on Wilson Street with three screens and a phone that never rings. When the grid pulls tight, I choose who gives.
Homes? The clinic? The cold rooms at the packhouse? Or the racks out on the old tobacco land in Greene County.
Mostly I pick the racks. That was the deal we cut in '38. They run hot when power is cheap. They go quiet when it isn't… and they pay us for the quiet.
My bill last month was sixty-one dollars. Under it sat one more line. FLEX CREDIT… minus eighty-eight.
So the power company owed me twenty-seven dollars.
My grandmother would not believe that.
She paid three hundred and forty dollars one August. She sat at the kitchen table and cried over the paper.
I was fifteen. And I remember the crying better than the number.
That was the summer the town said wait.
There's a plaque at the town hall about it now. Small thing. Bronze. Six words. "August 2026 — Farmville asked for time."
People stop and take pictures of it. Mostly people from away.
We did not feel brave at the time. We felt slow.
Snow Hill said yes. Greene County said yes.
So they got the money first — ballfields, a new roof on the high school, a road that doesn't flood. For about ten years we were the town that told the future to come back later.
My uncle Rob never forgave the board for it. He died still mad about it.
Here's what he missed.
The towns that said yes signed thirty-year deals at 2030 prices. We didn't sign anything.
So when the co-op fight came in '36, we still owned our own poles.
That is the only reason I have a dial to turn.
I don't want to make it sound clean. It isn't.
Farmville is smaller than it was. Our school shares a principal with Fountain. Half the storefronts on Main belong to somebody's cousin and open three days a week.
We are not rich.
But we're not owned, either.
And there's one thing I miss that I can't get back.
I miss not thinking about it.
Power used to be invisible. You flipped a switch and there was no politics in it.
Now every eleven-year-old here knows what a megawatt is. And knows which streets get dimmed first. My daughter says it like a weather report.
She has never once been scared of the dark, though. Not one night of her life. That's new too.
Some nights I sit with the dial and think about my grandmother at that table… crying over a piece of paper.
She thought the bill was the problem. The bill was never the problem. The bill was just the receipt.
Anyway. It's almost four.
Time to bring the town down.
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