Twenty-eight-foot waves had battered the trailer park. A storm surge powerful enough to scatter the mobile homes around like toothpicks. My husband, Bill, carefully approached the one that had been ours. The windows were smashed, the doors and sides crushed like a discarded aluminum can. A line of sand, mud and seaweed halfway up the side of the trailer showed how high the ocean had risen.
Bill looked at the slip of paper in his hand and shook his head. A list of everything we hoped could be salvaged. Favorite photo of Mom. The new TV. Microwave. And at the top, the most important thing: my grandfather’s blue teapot.
The little trailer at Beach Haven Inlet on Long Beach Island in New Jersey had been our summer home for 33 years. Since we retired, we’d spent the winter months at our condo in Margate, Florida, but when the weather turned unbearably hot, there was no place we’d rather be than the Jersey Shore. The beach at LBI was a place of so many memories. My husband and his father ran a part-time charter fishing business there. Our kids were lifeguards and avid surfers. We were even baptized in the Atlantic Ocean.
Then came Superstorm Sandy. Bill and I had seen many a storm roll through the Jersey shore in all the time we’d spent there, and we knew the dangers. LBI is 18 miles long and only one quarter mile wide in some places, so it’s particularly susceptible to surging tides. The Nor’easter of ‘62 cut the island into pieces. We’ve had power outages that lasted for weeks, even a time when Bill had to ride out a storm on our boat. But after Hurricane Irene passed by with barely a whisper, we were lulled into a false sense of security. When we packed for the mandatory evacuation, we left our precious belongings behind. Grandfather’s little blue ceramic teapot—a gift he’d given to my mother, who had passed it down to me—was the one thing I couldn’t bear to lose.
Friends helped Bill climb inside the crumpled, musty trailer. Everything had been tossed topsy-turvy. The microwave was in the sink, but unbroken. The TV had somehow stayed above the waterline. My favorite photo and our albums were wet, but restorable. Then something on the floor caught Bill’s eye. A flash of blue. Oh no, he thought, the teapot.
He dug around in the mud, hoping to find enough shattered remains to glue together. Instead, he pulled the whole teapot out—completely undamaged, only missing its lid.
He found the lid in the sink underneath the microwave—without a scratch on it.
