A nor'easter coming up the Sound hits Southport sideways, spray off the harbor mixing into the snow until the streets go the color of an oyster shell. Fairfield CT Plow runs through it — driveways and lots pushed back, walkways shoveled clean, salt worked into the places where wet snow turns to glass by evening. Storms here rarely arrive politely, so the truck goes out more than once and finishes where it started. Fairfield wakes up, opens the door, and the way out is already there. That is the entire ambition, repeated every time the sky turns over the water.