Irene

The wind woke me up at 4 a.m. It was screaming and battering against my windows. I lay there listening to it for a while, and then realized that I heard the sound of gushing water inside my apartment. It was a horrible sensation. I ran into the kitchen, turned on the light, and saw a flood on my kitchen floor. The entire floor was covered in water. My cat’s food bowls were floating. Hope perched on the kitchen table, staring down at the mayhem, glancing up at me like, “Uhm, could you please explain what is happening and why my food is floating?” The water was coming in through a crack in the molding at the top of one of my ancient windows. “Coming in” is a gentle way to describe the gushing curtain of water pouring out of my wall. So I went to work. I quickly grabbed towels and put them on the window ledge to soak up the water. The towel was soaked through in 30 seconds. But I had to deal with the floor, so I raced about with towels and paper towels, and also my mop. The water swirled around but eventually the floor was cleared of water. Wet towels were bunched up on the periphery. The water was still pouring in from the molding in the window. I lined up pots, buckets, and a Tupperware container on the ledge. The “plonk plonk plonk” of the raindrops suddenly replaced the gushing sound of pouring water. It was one of the most annoying sounds I have ever heard, but it was better than a flood. I raced around to all of the other windows, checking to see that they were secure. They were. The wind screamed and shrieked. I was so glad I had decided to stay home and not evacuate – because it would have been a disaster if that flood had gone on one second further. I went back to sleep, incredibly, after that, and woke up at 6 a.m. The buckets/pots/Tupperware were nearly full. The curtain of water continued to stream down. I emptied the buckets/pots/Tupperware and then put them back on the window ledge. “Plonk, plonk, plonk”. I had to empty them once more over the course of the next couple of hours (the rain really stopped by 10 a.m.) I did not lose power. I am lucky. Many of my loved ones are without power (mainly in Rhode Island). The Facebook posts and Twitter tweets have been extremely entertaining. Seth Meyers Tweeted yesterday, “If the Internet goes out is there a central location in New York for us to drop off handwritten tweets?”

I am still laughing about that.

The middle of the day today was deadly still after the crazy rain and wind of the morning. The sky was truly odd: alternately blinding white and smudgy black. In the afternoon, during my walk, by the end of it I felt the wind noticeably pick up. It was sudden: one moment it was still, the next moment the wind was roaring. The clouds started racing over to blot out the white, and I thought: “Okay. Time to go home.” Over the course of the afternoon, the wind continued to pick up, and then, from around 4 to 7 p.m., it was violent and ferocious. The trees strained against the wind. It felt much bigger than the wind of 4 a.m. But no rain. We are now under yet another flood warning. The buckets/pots/Tupperware are in place. I am watching My Man Godfrey. We have been very lucky. It could have been so much worse. My thoughts are with all of those who have yet to go home, after evacuating, or who have suffered a lot of damage. I am proud of New York and how we handled it. New York is not accustomed to weather. A blizzard can shut us down (and it has), but hurricanes rarely make landfall anywhere near New York. We were lucky in that the storm had weakened by the time it got here, although the sight of the Hudson River slopping up over the wall into Battery Park was quite alarming and made me happy that people had prepared for it, as frenzied as it was. I grew up in Rhode Island. I understand hurricane panic, and the weird let-down once it passes. You get immune to the panic. You just go out and buy your damn batteries, and board up your windows, and stock up on board games just in case. But all in all, we made it through okay.