After the Storm

Just a quick post from upstate, in between college shopping trips and unpacking storage units and carting boxes and plastic bins up stairs and setting up new rooms for one college junior and one college senior:

Well, my mom and my aunt weathered the storm with no leaks and no power outages, though my mom spent the night awake and terrified by banging, crashing sounds and howling winds and the blinds swinging from side to side so that she kept trying to find where the wind was coming in and disturbing them so. I told her it was the entire upper part of the building that was swaying in the wind; my aunt lives on the eighteenth floor.

Many apartments in our complex got flooded, but not my aunt's. We don't yet know the condition of our apartment and won't be any wiser until we return home tomorrow. The repointing of the brick facades that has been going on for the past two years didn't help matters. I also have no idea how my mom's apartment came through, as she hasn't yet been back to it. She's spent most of today dozing in the armchair next to my aunt's hospital bed, catching up on the sleep she didn't get last night.

Imagine: My mother spent the entire year until this month in the Caribbean, and a week after she gets to New York, she is having to contend with a full-fledged hurricane. The world feels upside down. At least Irene deflated to a tropical storm as soon as she came ashore at Coney Island and she speeded up, too, so that the storm had moved past the city by 10 a.m, even though it was supposed to sit over the city until 2 a.m. tonight. My husband says Irene got to New York and gave up the ghost. One headline screeched, "Irene Fails to Wow the City." Seriously? I am just so relieved things went as they did. And if there is no flooding to deal with in my mom's apartment or ours, I will sing hallelujahs.

And to my friends here, thank you for thinking of us as the storm approached, and sending the good thoughts. I think they helped! All those thoughts weaving a safety net over the city. Who was it who said, Thoughts are things?