When I returned to work this week in the aftermath of the ice storm, I found it hard to reconcile the comfortable normalcy of the office with the destruction my hometown had just gone through. I wrote the following thoughts as a way of conveying to my mostly city-dwelling colleagues what their fellow citizens had been going through:

Here in Harvard, many of the country roads look like a tornado has come through. The tops of trees have snapped off under the weight of the ice, tumbling down across the roads, and getting snagged in the power lines. The smaller of the fallen treetops look like giant wishbones dangling from the lines, the others like outstretched hands with their many fingers pointing to the ground that they just can’t quite reach. The telephone poles have snapped in turn, and wires are lying everywhere on the streets. I pulled some wishbones and hands out of my neighbor’s power line, enough at least to clear the road so that work trucks could get through. The ceramic insulator where the line attaches to the house had been ripped clear out of the wall, along with six feet of electric duct.

The town’s Department of Public Works and volunteer firefighters have been working around the clock to clear the major roads of fallen trees. I learned that the police crews had gone around Thursday night to round up elders and shut-ins and bring them to warm shelters. But let me say something that speaks to why I’ve chosen to live in this nearly rural community:

We’re managing because of neighbors caring for other neighbors. By Friday morning, folks were out in the street clearing the branches that the town crews hadn’t gotten to. I took my crosscut hand saw to a tree limb that had fallen from our yard onto the side street, feeling way overmatched by such a large portion of a mature maple tree, which now lay blocking the road. I cleared enough so that cars could come through, and later one of my neighbors came by, armed with a brand-new chain saw, and helped me turn the rest into firewood. Another neighbor helped me sweep the residual debris into an outside burn pile.

This is Harvard. We chose to live here because it’s a place where, in this ice storm, folks came out to check on each other, find out who had a wood stove for heat and enough firewood, who had running water, who had a phone line, or who had gone to which hotel if they could afford it. One of my elder neighbors across the street is too much of a proud Yankee to leave her home; she’s spent the past few days in her kitchen, burning through her wood stock.

The high school, which had heat and power, was commandeered as a shelter. I have a friend who runs the cafeteria—he has spent the past few days cooking for those who are staying there. My neighbor, the one whose yard served as a partial landing spot for that tree limb—she’s been up at the high school chopping vegetables to help out. When the power comes back, she’s on tap to drive the elders back to their homes.

And who knows when that will be? As I write this, the town remains without power, aside from isolated pockets, and will do so until Tuesday, Wednesday, perhaps later. The dull roar of generators tells you who isn’t quite so badly off, and has power enough to run the furnace or the well pump. My own household has come off comparatively easy: we have running water—warm even (with a gas heater), and our old gas cook stove has kept two rooms warm enough to stay in. We have candlelight—amazing how quickly you get used to it.

Leaving town, however, is a surreal experience: when you cross Interstate 495, most everything is normal. Acton, Concord, and the rest of the Boston area continue to be in the business of preparing for Christmas, with all the outside electrical light displays still blazing. Although I’ve often seen this wild use of electricity as coming awfully close to wasteful, I’ve never before felt resentment for the electrical usage of my fellow citizens. I caught myself feeling that way, an emotion that I do not confess with too much pride. I think this must come form the same place as the kind of resentment we hear from recently developing nations about the United State’s freewheeling use of energy.

I hear that other towns got it worse than we did—towns like Townsend and Ashby, and so much of Worcester County and southern New Hampshire.

The experience has also made me reflect on what it must have been like to live through far more profound disasters. I’m thinking in particular of the Katrina catastrophe. My older daughter volunteered her school vacation time last year to help rebuild houses in New Orleans. She brought back photos of the untouchable neighborhoods of the lower ninth ward: vast expanses of weedy grass lots with a network of roads running through them and not a house in sight. A few years ago, these had been densely populated neighborhoods, the lots filled with homes, the roads filled with cars, and the yards filled with children.

I think of that, and I feel so lucky.