Picking Up The Pieces

Sorting through rot and waiting for FEMA, a Manhattan Beach native returns home for the long, slow road to recovery.

Photos by Gabrielle Sierra

“We are out of sliced ham,” my mother said over the phone. “That is our chief concern at the moment.”

It was ten a.m. on October 29, 2012, and my parents and brother were making breakfast in Zone A. Hurricane Sandy was on her way and the residents of Manhattan Beach, a Brooklyn community located on a peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and Sheepshead Bay, had been told to evacuate. My family decided to stay, as did most of their friends and neighbors.

“If a tree falls in the house,” my mother said, “we want to be here to hear it. You get it Gabrielle? It’s a joke.”

I got it. But it didn’t make me any more comfortable with them staying there, particularly as I sat in my Williamsburg apartment watching NY1 newscasters practically pee themselves with fear over the coming storm.