I met a
woman named Fiorella last weekend. She lives in a one-story house less than
half a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, close enough to hear and smell the sea.
The siding of Fiorella’s house remains, as do the beams and hardwood floor inside.
Everything else is gone.
Fiorella is
an elementary-school teacher on Staten Island, and she lives in Midland Beach –
an area of New York City decimated by Hurricane Sandy, sometimes with fatal
results. Like so many others around her, Fiorella has nothing left but the
framework of a home. On Saturday afternoon, she looked at the piles on her curb
– of garbage bags, wooden posts, damp drywall and waterlogged sandbags – and spoke
to the people standing outside with her.
“I know it’s
hard to believe, but it really was a nice house,” she said. “I had a little
fence around the outside, and it looked pretty.”
Fiorella
was taking photos of everything, presumably for whatever insurance or FEMA
purposes she could, and she was looking through the bins of soaked belongings
outside her home. While she did so, a team of volunteers – some of them
teachers like myself, others Mormon disaster-relief workers, others friends or
concerned neighbors – worked to unload the contents of Fiorella’s basement.
Wood, drywall, tools, Christmas decorations, books – all of them were lugged
out. The most efficient means of cleaning ended up being a snow shovel – scoop up
the stuff, then dump it into a trash bag. We carried it all out, from the complete
works of Shakespeare to the little desk decoration reading “World’s Greatest
Teacher.”
When all
but the washing machine had been carried out of Fiorella’s basement, she asked
that we take photos with her. I asked how she was doing, nearly two weeks after
this monster of a storm had changed her life so dramatically. She said that at
first, it seemed unbearable. But then, each day, helping hands have come to her
home. Each day, something has been done – a wall taken out, or furniture
removed, or a basement cleared out.
Fiorella
has a mortgage on this house, so it’s not as if she can just pack up tomorrow and
move farther away from the ocean. There are four neighborhoods worth of
homeowners dealing with this dilemma on Staten Island, areas that look more like
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina than anything you’d recognize in New York. As
the city posts red, yellow and green stickers on homes to identify the level of
damage, homeowners like Fiorella wonder what they can do, and how they can
recover from this massive punch to the gut.
And yet,
they are here. They survived this storm, and their gratitude is so clear when
you speak with them. There’s Anton, who lost his basement in Oakwood Beach but
fed the volunteers who helped him with donuts, water and coffee. There’s Kevin,
who has nothing left in his bungalow on Midland Beach yet thanked volunteers
when they brought him food and toiletries. There’s Chelsea, whose house in
South Beach was spared but spends all the time she can helping her neighbors.
There are Staten Islanders up and down that borough’s east shore working to
make the best of what has happened to them.
Fiorella
said it’s hard not to feel your spirits lifted when so many people show up to
help you. I told her I was amazed at the amount of hope she exuded – she talked
about putting the photos of volunteers on her Facebook page, of all things. But
then, as I celebrate Thanksgiving today, I guess Fiorella’s loss has led her to
do something that some of us only do occasionally – she’s looked around her and
taken stock not of what she’s lost, but of what she has. And those Facebook
photos reveal more than just social-networking cool – they show a sense of
community and fellowship that can’t be replaced. You can get another copy of
Shakespeare, and there are plenty more Christmas ornaments to be had. You might
even be able to rebuild your house, with a little help from your friends and
certain bureaucratic procedures.
But you can’t
replace life or love, and Fiorella’s got an abundance of those. So for that
reason, I think she’ll be OK. As for me, I’m just incredibly thankful I met
her. And you know, it still is a beautiful house. Because a house is only as
lovely as the people inside it.
Happy
Thanksgiving.
