The wind and rain were gone. The skies were as blue as the eyes of a Swedish Stewardess and were dotted with those puffy clouds you look for shapes in. A breeze whipped the grass around and rustled the limbs of of the trees still standing – few as there were in my part of the neighborhood.

My building fared better than most. We stood 15 feet in the air on stilts; the garage space underneath the apartments was open and passed the wind through pretty harmlessly. That 30 foot storm surge – the one that knocked out the I-1o bridge across the back bay, had flooded everybody around us the night before. Not us though, high and dry, reletively speaking. The apartment next door had a window blown out and their inside was soaked.

Those neighbors Mark and Dave and I sat on our stoop. They were holding hands. Power was out. Below us on the street, a Red Cross van rolled toward us bearing coffee and sandwiches. Soon, MRE’s would follow. No one would starve.

It’s the little things that count and I was glad to be alive.