‘Valley’ girl

Miller PhotographyParaprofessional Deborah DiGirolamo, from PS 185 in Brooklyn, starts loading her vehicle with supplies for her adopted neighbors in upstate Schoharie. When the community that had opened its arms to her lost all but its soul in the floods, Deborah DiGirolamo opened her heart and gave back.

Since Hurricane Irene, DiGirolamo, a paraprofessional at Brooklyn’s PS 185, has driven more than 10 vanloads of supplies — mostly donated by school colleagues — upstate to Schoharie Valley in the Catskills, which was devastated by the storm.

The Bay Ridge woman and the bucolic valley go back together.

Six years ago, she and her husband bought a house in the beautiful but economically depressed area as a weekend getaway.

The more DiGirolamo got away, the more the home away from home started feeling like her true home.

“People are just so nice and friendly and hard-working, soon I had a lot of good friends,” she said.

The DiGirolamos were in their Middleburgh house when Irene hit, but being on a hill, it was spared.

Below them in the valley, however, was a different story. A letter passed on to the New York Teacher from DiGirolamo’s friend, Jen Sawyer Torgersen, describes it best:

“Slimy contaminated water rising to your second floor … tractors, cars, swing sets, a shed, your neighbor’s freezer floating by … cows and goats floating past, mouths upward, gasping for air, kicking, trying to find a footing on something, somewhere.

“Everything on your first floor turned upside down and mixed with the contents of your refrigerator, with your laundry, trash … lifelong photo albums and family mementos soaked in mud and corn silage and cow manure … the bank, stores, gas station gone, the farmers’ crops gone, muddy hay and rotten apples stuck to every sign, every railing, tree, lamppost, car.”

DiGirolamo cried when she read the letter. Then she rolled up her sleeves and kept going. Taking the donations coming in as a result of the flier she posted in the faculty lounge at PS 185, she loads up her vehicle every Thursday after school and on Friday afternoons drives up to the valley.

If she has a specific request, such as for a television she delivered to a man too traumatized to speak, she’ll make home visits.

“Otherwise, clothes go to an old video store on Main Street in Cobleskill and food donations I bring to a church in the town of Schoharie,” she said.

On her drive, she sees the farms her neighbors toiled on all year flattened, gone.

She joins the generations of people sweeping, digging and cleaning together.

If there’s anything that can be called an upside to the tragedy, according to DiGirolamo and her friend Torgersen, it’s the outpouring of help and compassion, not just from neighbors.

Strangers arrive to clean mud from possessions with bleach and a toothbrush, to rebuild houses or just to deliver donations the way DiGirolamo does. But she is no stranger. Not anymore.

“In just six years of being there, I feel like I lived there all my life,” she said. “I love the community.”