Washed Away: Far Rockaway The Day After Sandy

All of my mother’s belongings were strewn about as if a giant agitator from a washing machine had been running spin cycle in the apartment. My childhood pictures, her record collection, her turn of the century People Magazine collection, her shoes, and even her refrigerator were ruined, displaced, or disheveled. There was a mark of dirt along the walls as high as my chest marking the uppermost level of the water. The toilet brush was on top of the coffee maker…suffice it to say that is not its normal resting place. Michael informed us that the refrigerator had been face down and he had righted it–but the pork roast was on the floor, dripping in juices that seemed less than delicious.

It was heartbreaking in many ways to see my mother’s belongings destroyed but also that apartment was newly renovated shortly before my wife and I moved in there around the time we were married–having had a hand in those renovations I took a pensive pause. The laminate floor was coming up and I recalled the reason for I stalling them had been to resist water should the water heater burst. I walked outside and looked at the weeping willow, recalling when it was planted. I felt a sudden sense of futility and mortality in the face of creating and sowing bookended with destruction and reaping. The dead end street which had housed a universe of play and imagination in my childhood was inevitably as finite and susceptible to the whims of nature as anything else. Something about one’s childhood seems immortal and unending until its settings and trappings are removed or damaged. With my own kids sleeping in the car and my childhood awash with receding flood waters I suddenly felt grown–and not in a rewarding and accomplished way, but rather in a removed and distant way.