It often is: sleet, snow, ice, wind. Last week the subways broke down again and the buses were stranded in pools of water on the east and west highways, water that rose and sloshed over the already battered guardrails, insurmountable flaws in the grading and infrastructure of everything. Chita Goldman, in Riverdale, watched it all on television, thinking not for the first time that her ancestors, fled here from Latvia, had it right to choose the Bronx. Higher ground, she thinks. Not like Far Rockaway. Or God forbid, Staten Island.Now she sits at her seventh-floor window looking out at the rain that falls in torrents. No Hudson River light today, no more the subtle glow that inspired all those painters, that fell on the river at a certain time each day. The Palisades is a fortress of black and gray rock and here, in her neighborhood, the sycamores snap like twigs, the air alive with all the swirling leaves never raked from autumn. The first winds will be the strongest, the newscasters had said, though who believes them anymore?
