In flood-ravaged Schoharie, NY, people are hanging together around the dinner table. Excerpt:

Floodwaters rose as high as eight feet on Main Street, swamping all the businesses. Of 350 homes, 270 were flooded. Fuel-oil storage tanks the size of brownstones toppled like dominoes, spilling their contents into roaring waters.

“In the first couple of weeks, people said, ‘We’re done, we can’t deal with it, we’re leaving,’ ” said John Borst, Schoharie’s mayor.

Now, more than four months later, the village has hardly returned to normal. Streets are still lined with Dumpsters, backhoes and Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers. But Schoharie (pronounced sko-HAR-ee) is holding on, and many here attribute its resilience to a makeshift cafe that popped up days after the storm to feed villagers and emergency workers.

Week after week, month after month, it has served free hot lunches to residents, volunteers, reconstruction workers and anyone else in search of a simple meal and some company.

Somehow — randomly, unpredictably — food continues to arrive as if from a bottomless pantry, delivering some good fortune to a village that could use it.

Isn’t that great? This sense of covenant the local people have, expressed through food.

This reminds me of a conversation I had the other day with someone in my town. He was complaining about local politics, and what a bunch of knotheads and do-nothings local politicians are. Honestly, I have no idea if he is right or wrong in his assessment, but it was a familiar litany of small-town problems, complications, factionalism, and so forth.

“The thing is,” said this man, “like your family saw with your sister, when you get in trouble, they’ll all be there to help you. Even the assholes.”

The poet Robert Frost famously said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Having stolen the thought from an anonymous citizen, the layabout Rod Dreher adds, “Home is the place where, when you get into trouble, even the assholes will show up to help you out.”