Shelter from the Storm
By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo
It’s been a rough year. The tragedies that have struck this country (and especially our region) in a short-time are emotionally overwhelming. It’s a rare week that brings no news of a horrific incident somewhere in the United States, not to mention what is going on throughout the world.
I usually avoid watching the news, but when the F4 tornado ravaged parts of Oklahoma last week, I couldn’t refrain. My husband and I watched two straight hours of CNN coverage and then foolishly tried to go to sleep. We ended up lying in bed discussing a wide-range of disaster-related topics, including design of the perfect “safe room” for our basement. While that was enough resolve for my husband to fall asleep, I laid awake much longer trying to relate to what the Oklahomans had gone through.
I had some frame of reference. The roads on both sides of our house have washed out twice in five years, I’ve watched the Mad River rise halfway up the small hill below our house, leaving me wondering if we should roll up the rugs and evacuate. We’ve lost power for up to a week four or five times in as many years. We’ve never had cell phone service or reliable internet, so we fully understand what it’s like to live in a communications-void… but to lose everything? To emerge from your basement or bathtub and realize you have nothing left? No car to take you away from the ruins, no clean clothes to change into and not knowing if your children are safe… that is where it becomes impossible to relate.
The day after my sleepless night, I was shocked when the evening NPR broadcast was interrupted with that dreaded high-pitched series of beeps and that eerily calm, female voice warning listeners that a tornado warning was in effect for eastern New York and northern Connecticut. With all that fresh footage from Oklahoma firmly cemented in my brain, I wasn’t taking any chances. Armed with five Dr. Seuss books, two lanterns and a flashlight, my four-year-old daughter and I headed down to the basement, where we stayed for half an hour.
My heart was beating pretty fast when we first got down there, but rational thought soon took over. I was comforted by the greatest of all positive thoughts during extreme weather events, “This house has been here for 250-years. If nothing’s taken it out by now, it’s unlikely that anything will.”
The same can be said for the whole town of Norfolk. This is our refuge from the big, bad world – a place where we feel safe and protected. Whether returning from a doctor’s appointment in Hartford, or coming back from a long trip, there is that inaudible sigh of peace and contentment when you cross the town’s borders. The traffic lightens up, the flora and fauna become your focal point. Norfolk pacifies.
We spend a lot of time as a community thinking about what we need to do to make the town more marketable, how to widen the tax base, how we’ll survive the next century if we can’t attract young families, but I think the bottom line is that Norfolk is a haven of sorts. It is shelter from the storm, literally and figuratively. People will always settle here for that reason alone. We can take some refuge in that.