Others upstate were not so lucky, and in past storms, people have been left stranded on their (relatively dry) patches of roof.
Looking from space, the eye is drawn to the grey-brown line of the Piray river and to the great patch of pink roof tiles.
The water took prisoner everything it conquered: slabs of concrete and patches of tin roofs; beams and trees; nails and windowpanes; refrigerators and stoves; sofas and tables; clothing and books; boats, trucks, cars and motorbikes; livestock and pets; survivors and corpses.
He sized up the job, and once he added a few other items to his list — broken lights, droopy bits of roof, and a patch of mold advancing like a Panzer front across the dining room wall — he eyeballed the price at four thousand five hundred yuan, or about seven hundred dollars.
"Oh, God, I knew they were up to something," said John Capalbo, a cookie maker who was patching the roof of his house in Morris Park when he learned of the planned shutdown.
They have to fix the stairs or patch a piece of the roof or fix a cabinet.
We patched the roof of a Jamaican immigrant whose apartment had nothing in it but hundreds of rags, spread across the floor and hanging from interior clotheslines.
A useful myth of aesthetic experience took shape when, in "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu," the ailing writer Bergotte weighed the value of his life against that of a "little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping roof," in Johannes Vermeer's "View of Delft" (c. 1660-61), and then, with a fleeting thought that undercooked potatoes at lunch were causing him indigestion, fell dead of a heart attack.
