anniversaries

Five years ago today, I posted this little entry about a big-ass hurricane that was headed toward my homeland. I still get angry when I think about how long it took for FEMA to show up. I still get tight in my chest when I think about my mom holed up in the attic of their house. I still get intensely sad when I think about our family photos drenched in a 15-foot storm surge that was never supposed to make it past their 9-foot driveway of perceived safety. And I still want to write massively hateful letters to anyone who tries to defend the actions or words of the president at that time. But none of that will change what happened, or bring back those days when I didn't know where my mother was.

Tomorrow is five years since landfall. If you don't already know the details, the Times Picayune did up this really great interactive map that shows exactly how the city flooded. I've already watched it twice, until my husband made me close it. There's also this great photo gallery of "before and after." The photo that still turns my stomach is the one of the guys in boats out on Old Spanish Trail in Slidell, because that sign is about 3/4 of a mile from my parents' home.

If you grew up where I grew up, you would never think twice about staying during a hurricane. Chances are, if you chose to evacuate, you would end up stuck on the interstate halfway between Lake Charles and Houston, running out of gas and food like everyone else. You would go to the grocery a few days before, stock up on canned goods and jugs of water, tape your windows if you felt that was necessary, and wait it out. I can't count the number of hurricanes that just blew apart or only brought a little rain before they fizzed out or turned and hit Mexico or Florida. I'm not saying it's logical, I'm saying it's institutional memory. If you never evacuated for your whole damned life, why would you start? This is the way it was.

But that's not the way it is now. It took my parents four years to purchase a dining room set. Mom would say she didn't want to buy anything just to have it destroyed again, so they ate dinner off their patio furniture for four years. When they came to visit my house in Boston for the first time, she was shocked to see photos in my home that she thought had been destroyed. My childhood furniture that had moved out with me, eons ago, safe from that awful storm surge. The bookcase they had made for me when I was five years old. There are houses in their neighborhood people just didn't come home to. Across the main road from their neighborhood and the high school, some are still boarded up and vacant. The grocery store is a lot more crowded - Slidell took a lot of New Orleans refugees when they came home, and the sleepy suburb is no longer sleepy.

When strangers ask where I'm from, I usually tell them I'm from Boston. It's easier than going through the uncomfortable progression of:

"I'm from New Orleans."

*look of recognition dawns*

"Oh, do you still have family there?"

"Yes, almost all of my family lives there."

"Ohhh, did they make it through okay?"

-- at this point, I have to choose how much I want to reveal to these people who have no idea what I'm talking about. I can either say,

"Yeah, they did fine." - this puts an end to it

or

"No, their neighborhood took 14 feet of water and they lost everything."

....and that REALLY puts an end to it.

So I usually say I'm from Boston. Because I don't want to share all that hurt, anger, confusion, frustration, disappointment, fury with someone who doesn't know me, who doesn't know my story, and doesn't know my kin.

My friend Ebi is a psychologist. He says it's important for me to continue to talk through this because it's obviously unresolved. He has no idea how right he is. You need only look through the Katrina archive to see that we are not resolved. We are not all right. We are scarred and hurting and still wondering when we will get our homes back. But we are not down or deterred. We continue to rebuild when people say we are bonkers for ever putting houses on that god-forsaken land. They can stick it.

Happy anniversary, Big Easy. Love to you from a hometown girl in the great white north.