All day long during the March deluge that hammered Rhode Island, I was holed up in the house, working in the office, occasionally checking outside as well as in the dirt-floor basement. Any leaks? Any high water? Nope and hope. While the wind was heading the other direction, I slipped up the library window to shoot the flooded back gardens.
Impressive but temporary: by tomorrow all the water would have seeped away.

It wasn't until the next day, when the weather cleared and I tried to visit friends down the road in Westerly that I realized what the rest of the state was going through. An entire neighborhood by the Pawcatuck river was flooded. The local power station was knocked out for days. I was too stunned to remember to take pictures. Here's the main street of nearby Old Mystic, Connecticut, which became indistinguishable from the adjacent river. My soggy beds, my basement with a half inch of water in it: What storm? What damage. In these wild times, it can be a shock to realize what a blessing it was to have only that much water.