For those of you who've wandered in (on?) and feel confused by all the Katrina posts: these were all originally posted on another blog, Babies Are Fireproof, which is no longer open to the public. I wanted to save the content here somehow, and this seemed the easiest way. I've added some pictures to the return-to-NOLA posts.
Reading through them again five years later has been awful, I have to say. I'm also conscious of the gaps. There were so many things I didn't write about. We managed to have our annual Christmas party, in the brief window in December when we had electricity and gas, and people who came said visiting our neighborhood was like driving into the countryside, everything dark apart from our little porch light glowing in the distance. On Christmas Day itself, when we no longer had gas, we walked around the corner to Sarah Doerries' house to take a shower. We wore our dressing gowns and carried towels. We were standing on her steps chatting when the Salvation Army van drove past, and someone shouted up to ask if we wanted a cooked Christmas dinner. We'd already bought all our Christmas food, so we drove around to Richelle and William's house to cook it, eat it, and wash the dishes. (They were still away.) The kindness of friends, the kindness of strangers - this is what the months after the flood were all about.
A stolen, washed-out BMW sat crashed in our street until January. I was almost sad to see it go.
There were lots of other drowned cars around our neighborhood, especially in the neutral ground of Claiborne, where people had parked in the hope of keeping their vehicles dry. And some vehicles were just washed up there, of course.
In the background you can see the flayed roof of the Superdome. Strange to think of how quickly such a demonized landmark was rehabilitated. (In May 2006, I was there for the Tulane graduation ceremony.)
Some places were closed for business; others were open, sort of:
Some places - like the new Bruno's on Maple Street - had fallen down.
All over town, people were throwing their things away.
This is what the front half of our downstairs looked like:
And this is all we could salvage from down there - a few of Tom's scout things, and some of the wedding silver. Note the Lysol spray. We were spraying everything then, including ourselves.
Happy days. So, an update. It's five years later, and there's a new president (much better); Louisiana has a new mayor (also much better) and a new governor (even worse). I was wrong about Nagin: after he was re-elected he checked out.
As discussed in earlier posts, It took more than three months to get electricity in our place and almost four to get regular gas service. We didn't have a land line for eight months. The streetcar wasn't running the length of St Charles Avenue until the end of 2007. We spent the last of our food stamps on food for Christmas dinner 2005.
When we left New Orleans, in August of this year, Cartier was still our mailman. Russell still owns Arcadian Books. Some people we knew ended up leaving NOLA after Katrina, including Richelle and William. Becky stayed, of course. Just before Katrina, we put up a gazebo in her garden; the hurricane blew it away. Two summers later we put up another gazebo, and that got blown away as well. Too many of her family now live in Alexandria, Louisiana.
We're still very good friends with Rodney and Paige in Marksville, and we've been back up there many times. For five years after the storm we worked for John Ed and Tiffany Laborde selling crawfish bread at Jazzfest. We haven't been back to the Frog Festival in Rayne, or to the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, but there's always next year ...
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