(Host) With Vermont largely spared from the full wrath of Hurricane
Sandy, writer and commentator Stephanie Greene caught up with a neighbor
with roots in New Jersey, who’s still working to recover from Tropical
Storm Irene.
(Greene) Someone described the tangle of yarn that
stretched throughout Wilmington in the wake of Tropical Storm Irene as a
giant cat’s cradle, knitting the community together.
But to Beth Leggiere, who ran Handknits on Main Street, it was $100,000 worth of stock. Gone.
She
shakes her head at the power of the water that swirled through town
that day just over a year ago. It carried off her 300 pound, 12 drawer
Ikea counter that took two people to budge and dumped it on the shores
of Lake Whitingham, a half a mile away. The water came up through the
floorboards, ripped up the carpet and washed away her livelihood.
She
suspects that boats on Lake Whitingham may still find yarn tangled in
their propellers – even though large mats of fiber were pulled from the
lake after the storm.
When Leggiere was finally allowed back
into the front of her store – its back end was unsafe to walk in – she
rescued her computer and a skein of yarn that had caught on a nail as it
floated off a shelf. It’s a "Dream in Color" skein in pink and red with
silver sparkles. And it’s become sort of a talisman for her.
Miraculously,
the data from her computer’s hard drive was saved by Patrick Brown of
Brown Computer Solutions in Brattleboro. But like many merchants in
downtown Wilmington, Leggiere didn’t have flood insurance. She says that
only the people with recent mortgages carried it and were therefore
able to rebuild fairly fast. For renters like Leggiere, the road to
recovery has been long and frustrating.
FEMA, she says, was
"near useless". The agency referred her to the Small Business
Administration, which treated her loan request as a business expansion.
Because she’d lost 18 months of paperwork, Leggiere had to try and
recreate her records with the bank and vendors.
When it came
time to buy inventory again, the SBA loan would have charged Leggiere 4%
interest, so she turned to local relief groups, who seemed to have a
better grasp of her needs.
Leggiere bought new yarn using
personal funds, grants from the Irene Flood Relief Fund, and the Rotary
Club of Deerfield Valley. Some of her suppliers offered generous terms.
Now
Handknits has relocated to what used to be a garage right beside her
house, three miles north of Wilmington. The walls are brightly painted,
and though she estimates she has about 20% of the yarn she once did,
she’s again open for business. She plans to resume holding Knit Nights
and classes in crochet, knitting, and dying. She’ll even carry spinning
wheels and small looms. Her "Dream in Color" skein will have a place of
honor in a shadow box on the wall.
When Leggiere thinks of her native Hoboken, she shakes her head again, picturing, she says, her old cellar filled with water.
But she’s here now, darning up the holes left in her life by Irene, and thankful for new beginnings.