A New Home

I’m not quite sure how to say this, or how to explain it, but my family and I are buying a house—in New Orleans. It is a huge relief to have the weight of a decision off our shoulders. The limbo was killing us. And in a few quick hours on Monday, everything just fell into place and there we were, making a bid on a house and deciding to stay, despite the risk of another Katrina.

After months of going back and forth, sometimes changing our mind one day and then going back the next, we found ourselves last weekend thinking again about staying. We had been leaning towards leaving when an afternoon with friends and an evening at the first parade of the Mardi Gras season left us yearning to unpack our bags. Sunday we drove around and looked at a few houses (from the outside) and walked in Audubon Park and fed ducks while couples danced to swing music in a great gazebo built sometime in the early part of the last century. One house in particular caught our eye. It was a true New Orleans Victorian (a double shotgun converted to a single) a block away from the shops and restaurants on Magazine Street. It was priced right and, most importantly, is only a few blocks from the river, the highest point in the city. It was “high and dry” during Katrina and, presumably, would be again in another hurricane.

So we saw it on Monday at noon and knew instantly that if we were going to stay, we should not pass up this deal. It has loads of New Orleans charm—high ceilings, wood floors, painted medallions on the ceilings, exposed brick fireplaces—and was much cheaper than all of the other post-Katrina-priced houses we had seen. But were we ready to make the leap? Just that morning I had an interview with a school via video-conferencing and realized the job was not for me (it is a very small school, a freshman-sophomore campus, and I would be teaching almost all composition), plus my husband’s job prospects in the smallish city would be slim. But we still had hopes of returning to the Midwestern college town where we had lived before moving to New Orleans. So my husband made a quick call to the paper where he had worked and was hoping he could be rehired only to find out the region is in financial crisis and the paper might have to let people go. We suddenly realized, all viable prospects had been exhausted. In the space of a few hours, we had become New Orleanians again.

Now comes the fun and hard part of telling everyone we know. It is fun to tell people here. They are delighted we are staying. I suppose it is a sign of hope for them as well, that friends are restarting their lives here instead of pulling up stakes and moving on. But telling everyone “out there” is harder. How can we explain that after this most traumatic event and the seemingly grim prospects for the region we are reinvesting our money and our emotions, putting down roots in sinking soil, so to speak? I could say it is the magical pull of New Orleans—the music, the food, the culture, the parades, the revelry, the architecture, the friendliness of strangers, the scent of magnolias and jasmine, the beautiful weather in the winter. Or I could say it is our friends who have made this place home, and that the thought of starting all over somewhere else is daunting. But it is just as true that our jobs, as I have said all along, are holding us here. We may be risk-takers by staying and confronting future hurricanes, but we are not brave enough to risk un- or under-employment. We’ll take our chances with Mother Nature. And if she does hit us again, our new house will be insured against wind and flood (at reasonable rates, I am surprised to say, because the elevation is so high near the river).

So now, while I am sure I will continue to write about life in post-Katrina New Orleans and will rail at federal officials who are short-changing the region and local officials who are standing in the way of recovery, I hope that I can also move on to the kinds of issues that also affect me as a professor and a mother. It would be nice to reflect on other aspects of my life and let all of this take a back seat, to really get on with my life. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a more “normal” existence, at least until the next hurricane forms in the Gulf.