It has been five years since I graduated from college.
It has been five years since I moved to Chicago.
It has been five years since I wrecked my car in a fender bender the day before I graduated from college.
It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina formed over the ocean, and it is getting close to five years to the day that she barrelled over the Gulf Coast.
Have I mentioned that I lived in New Orleans for the four years prior to Hurricane Katrina? I moved, just before the storm, holding on to my old 504 area code and a glass jar of my prettiest Mardi Gras catches. Law school started and we were not more than a week in when suddenly, I was distracted by images and stories of the town that turned me into who I was…turning into some putrid. Rotten. Swollen to the brim with murky water, the air filled with eerie silence and cries for help and animals searching for their owners. Not the sounds I was accustomed to; the rumble of the street car late at night and hum of mosquitoes and the clinks of melting ice in glasses on front porches.
I can’t really tell you what that fog was like for the first week, other than to say I looked at every single photo posted on major American news sites. I saw photos of friends waist deep in water, of favorite places left in wet ruins. I spent a lot of time sending emails and making phone calls, trying to track down friends and loved ones. Were they in Atlanta? Houston? Had they made it Shreveport or only to Baton Rouge?
I went back in January of 2006 and volunteered my time for a week. I wore work gloves and masks and I pulled carpet and molded dry wall out of two homes. I ate cold military ration meals and I cried a lot. This place was so familiar and yet so foreign and it didn’t seem like I was even making a dent.
On my own, I probably didn’t make a dent. But my efforts, in combination with the efforts of hundreds of thousands of other volunteers; some as organized as the American Red Cross, others in school groups like my own, made a dent. We tossed and sorted and nailed and drilled and slowly but surely New Orleans rose from the rubble, like a modern day phoenix. Built on the sweat and tears and belief of its residents, both literally and those who adopted it, realizing that America needed the City That Care Forgot to be…complete.
Favorite places slowly reopened, some with new management most with new floors. Plaques were quietly nailed to walls marking the water line at that particular location. Red beans & rice began to bubble away on stove tops and Mardi Gras Krewes rebuilt their floats & tossed beads once again.
In January of 2010, when the New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl, I cried quietly. B asked me why I wasn’t more outgoing, why I wasn’t whooping and hollering. I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t say much other than to keep repeating the phrase ”I Believed” as tears spilled out of my eyes. The Superdome, once the place where I graduated from college, then an international symbol for human suffering and despair had suddenly become the home of the greatest football team that year. The home of fans and residents who stood by a team and a city that no one else had much hope for.
New Orleans, I always believed. I always will.
And I will always come home.
