Monday, November 12, 2012

Is the universe trying to tell us something?

On October 25, my husband and I packed up the family, said farewell to Brooklyn, and headed across the river to New Jersey. Four days later, the state was ravaged by the worst storm on record. It ripped trees out of the ground and crushed houses, tore down power lines and washed away much of the Jersey Shore.

We huddled inside and waited for a tree limb to come crashing through a window. But by some miracle our house remained untouched. We didn't even lose power. We awoke to the buzz of chainsaws and emerged to find our neighbors in full recovery mode. The wind had toppled several large trees, but no one's house was seriously damaged. There was an air of giddiness as the men set about carving up the fallen limbs, happy to have an excuse to use their serious power tools. The houses on the other side of the street had lost power, and orange extension cords stretched across the road in a neighborly sharing of electricity. 

We had seriously lucked out. For us, the worst fallout from Sandy was the fact that it turned what would normally be a breezy, thirty-minute commute into the city into a gnarly, soul-crushing clusterfuck. And I haven't even had to deal with that. The storm knocked our train line out of service, and I've been working from home while Steven makes the heroic trek, waking up at 4:30 in the morning to catch a bus in and then battling the irate crowds at Port Authority on the way back. 

Like I said, we are incredibly lucky. But occasionally it feels like I've been exiled; I left my office in Midtown on October 24th expecting to be back the following Thursday, but instead I've been gone for two and a half weeks. Maybe my punishment for leaving New York is to be banned from ever returning. Not that I couldn't get on a bus and go in, but with transportation still so unreliable and our little guy in daycare here in New Jersey, I'm staying put for now...