Katrinaversary 5
Another Katrinaversary is approaching. Five years now.
August always brings a lot of introspection for me.
As I’ve contemplated the storm again in recent weeks, I realize that I can now definitively say that my life is divided into two parts: the time before Katrina and the time after. When I think about my life before Katrina, everything seems so innocent and unblemished, so youthful and carefree. Grad school. Teaching. Literary readings. Knitting. Silly summer jobs. Having Fridays off to clean my little rental house in Metairie. The Parkview. UNO Press. Even the way I dealt with things that were difficult then was comparatively uncynical and naïve. The last things I remember before the storm is going to work on Friday in a cute vintage skirt and heels, drinking tea, saying morning prayer with the Episcopalians, and later going to a party. When I went to sleep, Katrina wasn’t expected to head to Louisiana. When I woke up, New Orleans had lined up in the crosshairs. I packed and left town that morning.
The entire year after Katrina was the hardest year of my life. I didn’t necessarily realize that as the months went by. Certainly there was the obvious dreadfulness of my protracted evacuation and my mom’s decline and death, and then there was the almost immediate move to Connecticut, which was covered in snow and as frigid as my battered soul for probably the next three months. But by spring, I thought I was recovering. I had friends and was seeing them a couple of times a week. I was dieting and losing weight and looking fantastic. I was crafting like I had never crafted before.
I was also drinking a lot and by myself. Lee had to travel a lot, and I did shots alone more than once on those occasions. And I smoked a lot of cigarettes. I had just a lot going on in my mind. New Orleans was never far from my thoughts, nor the events of Katrina and beyond. I had a panic attack at least once when I tried to stop smoking. I made a fool of myself with my drinking behavior when I went to Tampa for training. Things weren’t right. I wasn’t me: not the me from before, and not the me I would become.
That brought me to the following fall, over a year after the storm, and finally things began to calm down. And then I became pregnant with Penelope. And then the Katrina limbo that started two days before the storm’s landfall, the day I evacuated, was finally over. That’s how it seems to me now, these years later.
Everything that has happened after that point has been infused with maturity. By that, I don’t mean super-smart, wise adultyness. I mean lacking in youthful naïvte. There’s also definitely some wariness and skepticism. And moderation (of heart if not of portions!).
Our friends Jen and Tate came through Pensacola to visit us not long ago. They are moving to Morocco and went on a friend-visiting road trip on their way out of the country. It was so lovely to see them and spend time with them, and for them to see my children. Jen and Tate were our friends in New Orleans, and they stayed with me at my mom’s house after the storm for some period of time that we can no longer exactly recall. Apart from a brief meeting I had with Jen in Boston when she was there for a work conference in early 2008, we haven’t seen these friends since 2005.
They have not been back to New Orleans. For them, they had their time there, and it ended, and they are moving on. They are not “looking back” people.
I have been back, but not as much as I thought I would be when I left, and not as much as I imagined I would if I lived in Pensacola, back when we first moved to Connecticut. When I do go, I love seeing my friends (the ones who are still left), but it’s so different. New Orleans is a more than adequate example of “you can’t go home again.” The home you desire isn’t there anymore. The city is different, and all the people are as fundamentally changed as I am.
But I find I don’t care to try to duplicate the past. I think that’s what I tried to do too much in 2006. The city exists, the people exist, but the past is dead and buried. I sense that like a solid wall behind a heavy curtain, and I no longer need to bang my head against it.
When I see these friends, on some level I just want to sit in their presence and commune, without saying anything. Anything else breaks the spell. What they mean to me, I cannot put into words, and there would never be an appropriate occasion to do so. Perhaps it is easier to cherish them apart from them.
But even as I live this day-to-day life that by appearance is so far removed from the life before as to be unrecognizable, I can still feel the memories of that time as strongly as ever, for moments, anyway. There are still songs I can’t bear to listen to, that take me right back to any number of moments in that year of limbo. It’s jarring to go back there.
Maybe I will get my fleur de lis tattoo soon. I thought about getting it on August 29, but I decided that wasn’t right. New Orleans has been scarred by Katrina, but it isn’t Katrina. And the New Orleans I wish to commemorate did not yet know Katrina’s name. So maybe I will get it on October 29, which is my mother’s birthday. The tattoo is meant to honor her as well, since she is inextricably linked to my Katrina experience, and getting it on her birthday would lend another celebratory level to it. I think she would consider it a cool birthday present.