Seeing with Fresh Eyes

What a crazy week and a half it’s been. First my daughter came down sick and then my dad came for a visit. All the while I was trying to prepare for classes, which start today. I think I am ready for my first class tomorrow. More or less. And I’ve missed writing my blog.

Having my dad here gave me a new perspective on post-Katrina New Orleans. I was looking forward to him coming and to having a witness, someone from our family to see what has actually happened here. As everyone says, you can’t imagine it until you see it for yourself. No pictures or written description can truly represent it. And I wanted someone from the outside world to verify, I guess, that this is real.

Watching him experience this apocalypse for the first time brought all of the emotional impact home to me again. As I’ve already mentioned, you get numb to it. It becomes almost normal. But as we drove through Lakeview, our old neighborhood, I could see it hitting him like a ton of bricks. “Oh my God,” he kept saying. “This is just so sad.” Block after block, mile after mile. He was overwhelmed. “This is all just so senseless,” he finally said. And then he said he’d had enough. I tried to get us out, but there were detours and traffic back-ups. So we ended up driving around quite a bit more and sitting in a line of cars as we attempted to make our final escape from devastation back to civilization. With no traffic lights working, cops were directing traffic and we had to wait a long time in front of a row of once-beautiful, now-blighted homes. He certainly got a good look.

Our tour was also more emotional because, while I had been showing him our immediate neighborhood, I spotted a gray tabby cat only a block and a half from the house where I had been searching for Jasper a couple of weeks ago. I stopped in the middle of the street and opened my door and called out his name. Then I pulled over and ran up to the yard. I didn’t get a real good look at the cat, but my first thought was, “this isn’t him.” He was afraid of me and ran under the house and I couldn’t coax him out. I’m pretty sure this was the cat that had been spotted and that I had been looking for. What a strange coincidence that I would drive by and see him. But I don’t believe it was Jasper. I just stood there and felt both sadness and relief. I don’t have to worry about him being out there anymore. But I also can’t hope of ever seeing him or holding him or stroking his silky fur again.

Driving around Lakeview with my dad made me relive all of the pain of loss once again. And now, as school starts, I will be driving through the general area every time I make my way to campus. The university is an island, surrounded by miles of death and destruction. Living out in Metairie, I can avoid driving through there. But now it will become part of my routine.

The next day, after my daughter’s nap, I got her and my dad into the car to head for the playground. Our favorite ones are in New Orleans, I told my dad as we pulled away. “Oh, I don’t want to go back there again,” he said. I tried to explain that we wouldn’t have to drive through Lakeview, but we would have to drive through some flooded areas. He was reluctant. I said, “Well, Dad, this is where we live. This is our world now. We can’t avoid it.” That really hit him. We ended up going to a playground in Metairie instead because the traffic to New Orleans was so bad. But the next day we headed in to go to the zoo. My husband wanted to take my dad on a tour of the destruction out in the Ninth Ward. Surprisingly, he said he wanted to go. I was right, he told me. This was our world now. And he wanted to see the worst of it.

We had a wonderful time at the zoo. It is a beautiful place, a true oasis in the sea of wreckage and ruin. We reveled in the bright green palm trees and the vibrant flamingoes and care-free carousel. Then we got back into the car when my daughter should have been tired and ready for her nap and headed out to the East. I was worried about her looking out the window and hoped she would sleep. But she didn’t. She didn’t look around much, though. Instead, she played with her stuffed bears and we listened to cheery children’s tunes, which formed an eerie soundtrack to our destruction tour.

I hadn’t been to the Ninth Ward before the storm. So seeing it now didn’t hit me as hard as other areas that I knew so well. But it was hard not to be dumbstruck. From the bridge we saw where the Industrial Canal had been breached and only splintered wood lay in heaps for blocks where homes once stood. It is hard to believe that anyone would think they could return and rebuild that area. The wood-frame homes were either obliterated or severely comprised.

As my dad said his goodbye’s yesterday, he looked at me with a penetrating gleam in his eyes and said, “Don’t worry. You guys will figure things out. It’s really depressing here, but don’t let it get you down. You guys will come out alright.” He felt the need to leave us with a ray of hope and a vote of confidence, I guess. We need that, of course. But more and more I am not looking to the city’s recovery for signs of hope. We have to make our own way. Because we can’t depend on the city to bounce back from this. It may never.

Stop the Insanity

I’m not sure how much more of this roller coaster I can take. One day we have decided we are going to try to leave. The next we are deciding to stay. Literally. We simply can’t figure out what to do. And it’s driving me crazy.

What is making this all so unbearable is the fact that I have been in this limbo for years now. Every since my daughter was born I have been contemplating moving away from New Orleans, even if that meant a career change. A year and a half ago, as I prepared to go on the job market again, I wrote in a piece I submitted to the Chronicle of Higher Education: “There is this unspoken sense between my husband and myself that this is the year our fate will be sealed, and an even greater feeling on my part that my whole understanding of who I am will be determined by how I fare in this year's job market. Becoming a mom has radically altered not only my day-to-day life but also what my career means to me. Being a professor is both less important than giving my daughter the best opportunities in life and more important than ever as I try to hold on to a vital part of myself that I hope she will know and appreciate someday. A terrible choice may lie ahead yet.”

It was so frustrating to read that this morning and realize that I am still in the same place. The job market that year did seal our fate. My lack of success kept us here in New Orleans and made us victims of Katrina. But Katrina has thrown us right back where we were before. I’m getting ready to start teaching again, and I wonder how I will feel about my career once I am back in the classroom. Will I be willing to leave it? Or will I want to hang onto it enough to risk staying?

Of course, a lot of our decision making (or lack thereof) reflects the larger state the city is in. We read the paper every morning wondering, which way is New Orleans headed? The mayor’s now infamous comments during his laughable Martin Luther King Day speech have not inspired much confidence that the city can recover economically and will heal its racial wounds. Fortunately, Wynton Marsalis also spoke on MLK Day. Unfortunately, though, the media has not paid any attention to his inspirational remarks. The Times-Picayune published them today. Check them out. (I also recommend Chris Rose's hillaroius column about Nagin's speech.) Now if we can only get rid of Nagin (whom I generally respected until Monday) and find a true leader to lead us out of despondency and into the Promise Land.

Seize the Day

Today is supposed to be our “Seize the Day” day. Seven years ago my husband and I were hit by a car while crossing the street. We both had leg surgeries and went through months of recovery. But we were very lucky. It was Martin Luther King Day, so it’s easy to remember. And every year as we think about King’s legacy and how he moved a nation forward, we also think about our own mortality.

This morning on Al Franken’s show I heard Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, who was there in Memphis with King when he was shot, talk about how King was almost killed years earlier (I didn’t know that, or had forgotten it) and how King spoke very movingly in his Mountain speech, the night before he was assassinated, about all that he would have missed if he had died then, including delivering his “I Have a Dream Speech” on the National Mall in Washington. Then King said, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

We cannot all measure our lives against his. To inspire a mass movement, to give one’s life for the larger cause of human justice, and to still have the power almost forty years later to inspire people to make the most of their lives and to treat each other right, is beyond what most of us are capable of. Nevertheless, his example and his sacrifice beg us to walk through life with our eyes wide open, to remember that our time here is short, and to do what we can to make the world a better place.

So each year at this time I try to think about what kind of life we are living and how fulfilled I am by it. I inevitably return to the idea that I would like to be able to leave some kind of mark, not one of empty fame but of having contributed something worthwhile. I try to tell myself that teaching writing and literature is important work. Sometimes I think it is, like when students feel the sting of injustice and recognize their own prejudices when we read literature about race or gender. But teaching college doesn’t give you the opportunity to move students the way daily interaction with students on the high school level would. And writing to a select academic audience about the concept of “separate spheres” or the little-known literary history of minor nineteenth-century women writers feels rather like mumbling in your sleep compared to what King did with his ideas and words. I find myself yearning to speak to a larger audience. To be a part of the larger conversation going on in this country about parenting, women’s life choices, democracy, and opportunity. I am always talking to my composition students about how through the written word we can enter the debates we read about and become an active participant in the world of ideas. But as an academic, I feel I am limiting myself to a very small intellectual sphere, a “separate sphere” of professors and grad students who are often competing with each other more than participating in a conversation.

What has motivated so much of my work as an academic is the desire for recognition. The research grant, the Ph.D., the publication in a scholarly journal, the book contract with a distinguished university press, and tenure have all been feathers in my cap. But how much true satisfaction have they yielded? If I knew, as King did, that my days were numbered, would I be content with the work I had accomplished? Would I feel that I had done what I had been put here to do? That I had used my abilities to leave the world a better place? What the hell good is a talent if you use it only for personal gain?

Of course, none of these questions are new or unique. I have read the tormented musings of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a nineteenth-century writer, who feared that her desire to write and publish was motivated by selfishness. She came to the happy conclusion that God gave her the talent and the desire to write for a reason. And I have heard Ethan Canin recently say at a seminar that he doesn’t think fiction writing serves any social purpose, that he writes simply because it makes him happy. Of course, many of us in the audience tried to argue with him that what he did was valuable beyond his own pleasure, not because we were writers ourselves but because we taught literature and were trying to inspire in students the notion that stories matter.

I have to disagree with Canin in order to feel that I do have some purpose on this earth. For I have been nearly all of my life drawn to stories and know that my only real talents lie somewhere in the world of words. Our job is to figure out how to make something meaningful out of the talents we have and to share that meaning with the people around us, however large or small that circle is. And we will not die peacefully, and the world will not move forward, unless we first believe that we have something, however small, to contribute.

Having just read back through what I have written, I am surprised at where my thoughts have led me. I didn’t plant to sit down and write about “the meaning of life,” if that’s indeed what I’ve done. God forbid that any writer would sit down with that goal in mind. The very weightiness of the subject could throw you into a fit of writer’s block. But a blog seems to give you the opportunity to write about whatever pops into your head.

So I guess I can say that I have in some way “seized the day.” Usually, our “Seize the Day” day goes by with nothing more momentous that a trip to the grocery store and we feel like we have failed once again to do anything spontaneous or memorable. Today, it seems, will be no different. We are dangerously low on eggs, frozen pizza, and diapers.

But we have spent the last day or so having some very serious talks about our future, seriously hashing out what it is we want to do with our lives—where we will live, where our daughter will go to school and grow up, what work we will do, and how we can make a living. Like our accident, Katrina has given us the opportunity to reassess our lives. Seven years ago, we realized how lucky we were to have each other and how much we wanted to spend our lives together. So when I took the job in New Orleans (only 4 weeks or so after our accident), we knew it meant a new beginning, not an end, for us. Now are waiting to see what new beginning is in store for us this time.

No Sane Choice

Believe it or not, I am going to look at a couple of houses in New Orleans this afternoon. Are we crazy? Last week I was so far away from even considering staying that I can’t believe we are starting to talk about it now. The fact that we are is prime evidence of the roller coaster of emotions that I think is typical of Katrina survivors. We tend to fluctuate wildly from one week to the next (or day even) as we try to make reasoned decisions about the direction of our lives. But the choices, if rationally considered, are not particularly appealing. No one course of action stands up and says “Hey, this is the sanest thing to do!” Instead, any decision we make will feel crazy. And so the emotional turmoil takes over. There is just no way to approach all of this rationally.

We would love to move back to the smallish Midwestern city we lived in before coming down here, but we’re not sure how to manage it. The main stumbling block is our jobs. If my husband was able to get a job with his former employer (and that’s still a big if) and we did make the move, we would immediately lose 50% of our income. And I’m not sure how I would be able to start earning again. What are my options, even? Freelance writing is certainly appealing but also so unpredictable. Adjunct teaching is so poorly paid and subject to semester-by-semester renewal. And then there’s the demoralizing lack of respect accorded adjuncts at most schools, even though most of them are recent Ph.D.’s struggling to find (and certainly qualified for) tenure-track positions. It’s a demoralizing position to be in.

So is feeling like you are not in control of your life. My husband and I have decent jobs, but they are in a city we don’t feel safe in (never have--but now, forget about it). And now we feel stuck. I’ve put myself out there repeatedly over the years and been shot down. My husband knows from co-workers’ experiences that the job market in journalism isn’t much rosier.

So maybe, we are starting to think, we should try to find a “high-and-dry” house in New Orleans and stop this awful state of limbo we are in. We also don’t know how much longer we can take living in our 700-suqare-foot, refrigerator-odor-infested apartment suitable more for college students than a family. But even our prospects here, financially speaking, don’t look so good. It is becoming clear from our own online hunting and a recent house search of some friends of ours that a decent 3-bedroom home in Uptown that didn’t receive any water will cost you about a half million dollars. Prices per square foot have gone up 75% in Uptown since Katrina. What’s a middle-class couple with a small child to do?

The houses I’m looking at today are in the Irish Channel (south of Magazine Street). It was a neighborhood in flux before the storm, and now, who knows? Probably the best move is just to wait and see how things will shake out for New Orleans. Maybe sellers will come to their senses and lower their asking prices. Maybe Bush and the Congress will come through with Category 5 levee protection and coastal restoration. Maybe the city will get behind the Bring New Orleans Back Commission’s plan for rebuilding the city and real progress will begin. Maybe middle-income people who were flooded out will be able to afford new homes and will be able to stay. Maybe the schools will finally become places of learning instead of fear and ignorance. Maybe there will be a place for us here. Or maybe there won’t. But how long will we have to wait to find that out?

Raising Consciousness

I have been reading Stephanie Wilkinson’s essay “Say You Want a Revolution? Why the Mother’s Movement Hasn’t Happened” in Brain, Child magazine. She ends the article by talking about consciousness raising and how this is the start of change. Her article focuses on mothers, but what about younger women?

This past fall I began teaching a course called “Images of Mothering,” which was aimed at helping students think about the larger issues involved in the transformation we undergo when we have children from woman or individual to “mother.” I assumed that mostly mothers would take the class (we have quite a few non-traditional students). But I was surprised to find that most of the students were young and far from becoming mothers. As we went around the class and introduced ourselves, I was thrilled by their diversity—of background, circumstances, and opinion. One even declared that she had no idea what this class was about (it was listed as Women’s Studies, Special Topics in the bulletin) and that she didn’t plan on ever becoming a mother. But she was game for an interesting semester. And so was I!

That first week had already become the most intense teaching experience I had had. After years of teaching composition and literature to only-sometimes-willing learners, now I was exploring “real” issues with students who knew that they were learning something that would affect their lives. Then Katrina struck. I only knew them for one week, but I hope I get to meet some of them again.

I will never know what we could have accomplished that semester. I only hope that I have the opportunity to teach the course again because I believe that young women should think about the issues involved in becoming a mother long before they actually embark on that journey. How much I would have appreciated the opportunity to do so.

I feel like, for the most part, I was just winging it, despite the fact that I had waited until I was 34, had a husband and was approaching tenure. Much of my anxiety focused not on how I would take care of this child, but how would I do all of these things at once? And when I was pregnant I looked for books or articles from women who had gone before me to help me figure it out. I found a few, but I have found even more since then. There has been this incredible explosion in mother-writing. I hope it doesn’t end anytime soon. For I think the women Wilkinson interviewed are right, that raising consciousness—among men to, for that matter—about the difficult “choices” women are confronted with is crucial to making a better world for our children.

So Many Stories

My rekindled hope of finding Jasper has dwindled. I have been back every day, snooping around the abandoned neighborhood and calling out his name and leaving more food, which gets eaten. I have seen three cats, but no gray tabbies. And now they are tearing down the houses across the street from the house where a cat who looks like Jasper was spotted a few weeks ago. I can’t stake it out anymore, and I doubt the cat will even come back there. It is a noisy mess. And now I know what a demolished house looks like. It ain’t pretty. And it doesn’t smell pretty either.

But I have contacted Animal Rescue, which is still picking up stray animals, and they said they would look for him. So if he is alive, there is hope they will find him or that someone else will. If they scan his microchip, they can contact the shelter where we adopted him 8 years ago, and they will give them our number. But I need to stop hoping and searching. Driving over there and lurking around the ruins every morning has been an emotional odyssey.

On my forays into the area, though, I have met people from the neighborhood and have heard some interesting stories. The most remarkable was from a fireman, who pulled 80 people off their roofs the day after the storm. Now he and his family have moved back into his home. He had his three-year-old son with him. I couldn’t imagine bringing my daughter to that place. But his son has seen it all—he lives in the middle of it. I can’t stop thinking about what it must be like for them to live there. He said it is pretty eerie at night. There are no lights and everything is quiet except for the distant chirping of smoke alarms from vacant homes. But he is convinced Lakeview will come back and they are proud to be one the first who have returned. He said CNN was there to watch his kid open presented on Christmas. I drove by their house yesterday. It looked beautiful—green lawn, fresh paint, and landscaping. He did a lot of the work inside (they had 4 feet of water), so he was able to get it ready long before most others. Another man I met told me it will take another year before he can move back into his home. He also said that he stayed for the storm and retreated upstairs with his cat when the water filled the first story. When he was rescued they wouldn’t take the cat. So he and his son “found” a boat a week later and rowed it in to get the cat, who was still okay.

It was more than two weeks before the water had receded enough for my husband to drive up to our house. By then it was too late. We hadn’t thought about him trying to rescue our cats because we assumed they would have drowned right away. Now we are thinking that one of them probably did and was buried beneath all of the jumbled up furniture when the water receded, and that’s why we never found him. We still can’t imagine how one could have gotten out. The woman working at the shelter where we adopted him told me “you know, cats have nine lives.” And another woman I met said she found one of her cats as late as Thanksgiving, and she had no idea how he got out.

There are so many stories out there. You just walk up to anybody and ask them and they start pouring out their whole experience. At the playground, you compare stories with the other parents while the kids listen in. How many kids have been traumatized by all of this? How much does my two-year-old daughter process when she overhears my conversations?

As you walk around Lakeview it is especially easy to have such conversations as you stand right in the middle of ground zero. We know that we have the same pain to talk about. Most of the people there right now, though, are crews of workers, some local, I’m sure, but many not. You feel strange walking around the ruins of your old life as they look on.

Creating out of Chaos

I wanted to share a beautiful essay I just read about the urge to create, called "Finding the Courage to Begin Again" by Amy L. Wink. I have been thinking a lot myself since the storm about my desire to write. Something clicked for me about four weeks after the storm when I read a review of E. L. Doctorow's new novel The March about General Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War. This work recognized what so many other war novels did not, the reviewer contended, namely "the way that destruction transfigures, pulverizing established human communities and forcing the victims to recombine in new ones. . . . Yes, war is hell, and 'The March' affirms that truth, but . . . hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it's by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world. They have no [other] choice." These words came as a revelation to me. I had not yet begun to imagine the future. Yes, our lives would change. We would move on from this low point--if not to bigger and better things, at least to a normal life again. And an important part of that renewal for me is the urge to create out of the chaos. And I guess that's why I'm here now, blogging away, because I need to give shape to all of this. Amy Wink quotes Katherine Anne Porter: “Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, . . . but the work of the artist ... is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.” That's all we can do.

Searching for Jasper

Yesterday for the first time in four months I bought a bag of cat food and a bag of treats. And now I sit outside of a house one and a half blocks from our old house, hoping that our cat, Jasper, will magically appear.

A feeding station has been set up here, and a woman leaving the food spotted a gray tabby and took a picture of him. It was blurry, but I could convince myself it was him. This woman saw a picture I had posted of Jasper on petfinder.com a couple of weeks after the storm. My husband had just been back to the house and thought Jasper could have gotten out because he found a window broken. We had assumed from the beginning that he and our other cat, Zephyr, had perished as the flood water came up. It was 11.5 feet, according to satellite imagery. But there were signs that the cats had lived on the floating furniture. The thought tortured us. If they were going to die, we had hoped they went quickly.

My husband did find the body of one cat. (He threw my daughter’s bean bag over it so we wouldn’t have to look at it, but I could still see a flattened, matted paw reaching out.) But we never found the other. We’re not sure which one died because they had the same coloring. But we think it was Zephyr. Jasper, we hoped, had escaped. The next time my husband went to the house, though, he discovered that the broken window was double paned and only one pane was broken. On many subsequent trips, however, we never found another body in the house, we assumed the worst--until last week when I received an e-mail from a woman who had spotted some gray tabbies in our old neighborhood, where she has been feeding many surviving cats.

I came out here the other day and was shocked to see how close to our old house one of the feeding stations was. The woman who had lived here happened to be here retrieving some things (what I can’t imagine--the contents are completely ruined). She told me she was here during the storm. I stared in disbelief at her squat, one-story home. It was raised about one foot off the ground. I asked her how she survived and she said she had climbed onto the roof with her 50-pound dog. I wanted to hear more, but all she would say was, “You can’t begin to imagine what it was like unless you were here.” It must have been harrowing for her to even come back here. It is hard enough to see what the floodwaters have left behind, but to have seen the water lapping up against your home and submerging the whole area, and to be climbing onto your roof . . . She’s right. I can’t know what it must have been like.

While I talked to her, a car full of tourists from France pulled up and came over to talk to us. They were very sympathetic and concerned. But it felt awkward having them gawk at our ruined lives. One of them stood across the street in front of a white house where the water lines are very visible and had his picture taken while he pointed at them, showing how the water reached well above his head. (They aren’t alone, of course. See this story about post-Katrina tours in New Orleans.)

The woman who survived the storm told me she had just seen a gray tabby cat run across the street about 15 minutes before. I walked up a driveway, into someone’s back yard, peered into their house, and began to call out “Jasper, here kitty kitty.” No response or movement. So I walked around the block, calling his name, peeking into yards and homes where there was no sign of life. Occasionally a car would drive by. More gawkers? I wondered. Did they see me with my hands cupped around my mouth? Did they hear me calling a pet’s name? Did they feel bad for me? Did I make them think about their own pets, which they may have lost?

In the mad rush to evacuate, my husband had said that we couldn’t bring the cats. Indeed, it would have been very difficult. Zephyr never would have come. He was too wild. But we could have gotten Jasper out. He was a very affectionate, friendly cat, but not a pushover or a demanding lap cat. He was strong and had real character. My dad, who has always hated cats, fell in love with him. So did we, the first time we saw him, at a pet shelter just after Christmas in 1997. He looked straight at us and made eye contact. We felt a real connection with him. We doted on him as if he were our first born. When our daughter was born two years ago, poor Jasper lost his prized position at the top of the totem pole.

From that day on, I’m sad to say, we never fully appreciated him. How many new parents neglect their beloved animals when a baby comes? New-born love is so all-consuming that there doesn’t seem to be much room for anyone or anything else, sometimes even a spouse.

And now as I search databases and make phone calls to rescue organizations, I know I am trying to allay my guilt—for leaving him behind and not loving him enough. My husband says he will be happy if we find Jasper; he will be king of the hill for a long time. But he never wants to get another. I suppose we don’t really deserve one.

Strangely, my daughter doesn’t remember the cats. She loved them (although they only tolerated her), but how quickly they faded from her two-year-old memory. Someday we’ll have to explain, though, because there are plenty of pictures to remind us of them.

Returning to Disaster Land

Returning to New Orleans after a week and a half in beautiful, debris-free Maryland, has felt a little like stepping out of your warm, cozy home into a blustery storm. I had been bracing myself for my reimmersion into this alternate universe that feels even more disconnected from the rest of the country than it did before the storm. But it has been both harder and easier than I thought it would be.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in my journal about how I wondered if I would feel guilty about moving away from New Orleans, or if life in a peaceful, normal city would ever feel “normal” again. I wrote, “Would it be hard for us to go back up North? Could it be like a soldier who returns from war and can no longer look at the green lawns and noisy school yards in the same way? Of course it wouldn’t be quite like that. But I can imagine it feeling strange, almost like we don’t deserve it or as if it is a mirage. Sure, I crave a peaceful, stable life without storm debris lining the curbs, buildings crumbling, men hovering on every other roof (to repair them), Humvees roaming the streets, and every conversation being about FEMA or insurance or how many feet of water you had. But it might also not feel right if we suddenly had nothing more troubling to confront than a barking dog past midnight or the choice of a paint color for our new house. Is it right to live in virtual luxury—even the middle-class kind—when so many are struggling to rebuild this city that was our home? Is it right for us to escape the struggle that is going on here to retreat to a ‘normal life’ in the Midwest?” After my trip to Maryland I can see how much I crave the life the rest of the country is living right now. I was gone long enough that this place started to seem surreal again. How long before it reasserts itself in my mind as “reality”?

My return to disaster land was made even more surreal when I went into the belly of the beast yesterday. I drove through our old neighborhood, now a wasteland that feels as if its inhabitants have been vaporized. Every house is vacant and either stripped to the studs or left to rot. I have seen this all enough times that it even started seeming normal to me. But when I drove up our old street, I was shocked to see nothing but a gaping hole where our house once stood. We sold the house to a developer two weeks ago and knew he would tear it down, but I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Here was our old street, which we were only just beginning to settle into when Katrina struck, but our existence had been removed from it. Where once our home with the accumulated possessions of thirty-plus years stood, there was now only dirt. There were no trees, grass, concrete driveway, or brick sidewalk. Nothing had been left behind except for a beat-up washer and dryer on the curb. After a few moments of disbelief and a long, cathartic cry in the car, I got out to look closer. All I could find were a few of my husband’s baseball cards, a fragment of my computer’s hard drive, and a teaspoon in the dirt.

Until I had to confront its absence, I didn’t realize how much I had been holding onto that home, even though we had known for months it was unsalvagable and we would not feel safe rebuilding it. Many nights while I lay in bed, I couldn’t get the image of it out my head. I knew that only a few miles from here stood a vacant shell filled with the rotting, stinking remains of our life. I walked through it in my mind, passing over the overturned furniture, the boxes that were never unpacked, my daughter’s toys, the newspapers, kitchen paraphernalia, artwork, tv’s, CD’s, and my books, oh my books, hundreds of them. All of it was brown, covered in mud and flies, and emanating a stench that first hit you out on the curb and overpowered you by the time you entered the house. Markings spray-painted on the outside by rescue workers, broken windows, brown trees, twisted plants, black mold growing up the walls, slick mud covering the floor all marched through my mind when I couldn’t sleep. Then the things I couldn’t find but knew were there somewhere, buried under a pile of furniture or tucked away in a closet made inaccessible by a stray dresser, like the stuffed animal I loved as a child, or the photo albums containing indispensable memories, or my daughter’s baby book, or the computer with years of scholarly work on its hard drive.

Now that it is has all disappeared, I feel not merely sorrow at what we have lost. That feeling has been lying just under my rib cage for months now, making it difficult to breathe sometimes. But I think I feel lighter, able to inhale more deeply. It’s all gone, as if it never existed, which is easier to bear than knowing it is still there and slowly rotting away. Now I hope we can move on. I know I am ready to turn over the calendar and start anew.