Ten Years Ago

For what I hope is the only time in my life, ten years ago right now, I was a participant, not an observer of a cataclysmic event in history.   Hurricane Katrina was my hurricane.

Always before, when watching human tragedy unfold, there was a layer between me and the events on television.

There was no layer with Hurricane Katrina.

We evacuated to Birmingham, AL, so I have no horror stories of living through the devastation as it happened.

But every scene played out, I could see myself standing in that place, because I had stood there.

Cell phones didn't work.  And very few people knew how to text on a numeric keyboard.  I was one of the lucky ones, because I did know how, and could keep in touch with my daughter.

I was lucky that I worked for a global company, and so there was no problem using the internet at the hotel and my work laptop to stay plugged into my job.

I was lucky in so many ways.  No one in my family died.  I did not lose my home.  I did not lose my job.  I did lose something intangible, though.   I lost my sense of home.

I was not born in Louisiana.  But, as I have said many times since I moved here, the greater New Orleans area fit me like the perfect pair of shoes.   I found my soul's home here.

And I did not know if New Orleans would recover.

I know that many said that investment in recovery was stupid.   I know that people all over these United States simply could not wrap their minds around the magnitude of what had been broken.

My husband and I were able to live in a travel trailer provided by our company until we could go back to our house.  But we didn't know if staying was the right answer.

It took until April of 2006 to get our house repaired.   We had no heat that winter, but it was mild.  Again, lucky.

We looked at homes in Louisiana outside the hurricane flood zone.   We looked at moving to Texas.  We talked about moving to Mississippi.

We couldn't leave New Orleans.

We love this city.

And New Orleans is coming back.

We are rebuilding.

Amazing things have happened in the past 10 years of recovery, and we are celebrating those accomplishment this week.

But we still have a long way to go.

And I learned something important.

Where your soul calls home doesn't change.  And many souls call New Orleans home.

So we will always rebuild.  We will fight to recover.  We will always remember.

The rhythm of our city was interrupted, but not changed.  Our song is old, and resonant, and filled with the gumbo of people and cultures that have come together in our great city.

New Orleans is more than a place on a map built below sea level.  It is a culture, a family, a feeling.  It is a sultry summer night, a crisp autumn day, a torrential rainfall, a jazz riff.  New Orleans is a home for the restless, wayward soul seeking refuge.  For the misfit who who lives large and loves with too many exclamation points.  New Orleans is the soundtrack to thousands of stories of lost souls.  And the soundtrack to thousands of stories of salvation.

Not everyone is meant to live here.  New Orleans is too messy, too uncompromising, too uncouth, too broken for many people.

But for those of us who love her, who BELONG to New Orleans, New Orleans is our mother church, she is our true center, she sings the song that our souls dance to.

I'm so grateful to live here, and so grateful that the home of my earthly soul is recovering.

Tomorrow, my husband and I will walk and run with approximately two thousand of our fellow New Orleanians in the Resiliance Run/Walk.  We will celebrate the rebirth of our great city.  I'm sure I will cry, as will many others.

Everyone there will have a Katrina story, so many of them so much more tragic than mine.  But we all understand it is not a contest for who has the most painful story.  It is a celebration that no matter what we had to overcome, we are still here.  And we love, and we laugh, and we celebrate, and we dance.

Because that is what New Orleanians do.