I avoided the 5th anniversary hoopla about Katrina. I avoid most coverage of Katrina. I don't often think about it except the sort of once-removed way of wanting the house to sell. Jo brought up an article from the Tampa Times that her mother cut out for us. It was one of those 5th anniversary articles. I had no intention of reading it.
It ended up on top of the bathroom reading pile. It was one of those articles: "Unbowed, Unbroken". I put it down. The lead photo was one of a woman pushing her elderly mother in a wheel chair through the flood water. I picked it up again. I read the short blips about the musician, the hero, the children. I remembered why I don't read things about Katrina. Instead of really dealing with the issues, the media sets up archetypes to represent what it wants to find in the story of flood.
I don't see myself or my family in these stories. They are like myths meant to teach something but not meant to be lived in day-to-day life. I live in a very daily world. I do the laundry, pay the bills, and hang out with my children. I don't dwell on the flood. I know that I survived it and that it made a demarcation line in my life: Before the Katrina/After the Katrina. Before Katrina, I thought I would stay in New Orleans. After Katrina, I knew that wasn't going to happen. It wasn't that it was impossible. I could have gone back, figured out a way to make a living, and gone on with my life. I didn't do that because it was too unstable and unsettling for Ethan and Ryan.
New Orleans became a place that would always be associated with danger. What if it happened again? What if the patched levees didn't hold? How could feel safe? No place is really safe. Life involves risk. Those are cliches. I fall back on them when I try to understand my world in a context that makes some sense. Katrina did not make sense. The hurricane itself did very little damage to our house. The flood was what hurt it. The water flowed into the spaces of lives we try to keep warm and dry. It made Ethan worry about the heavy rain in springtime and made Ryan want everything recreated exactly the way had been in New Orleans. It made me think that having a land-line would somehow signal the return of normalcy.
We never returned to that version of normal. We moved passed being "the hurricane family" and have become something new. Katrina is still here. When people ask how long we've lived in Connecticut or what brought us here, Katrina reappears. I might not mention it. I might gloss over it, but in my head, it comes back. The sequence of events that led up to up, the summer full of hurricanes, the evacuation, Florida, buying this house, trying to reproduce the way things were in New Orleans, the friends that have scattered across the country, and a hundred vignettes of things that happened dance through my brain even if my mouth is saying, "We came up from New Orleans and decided to settled in Connecticut."
I read the article and put it back on the top of the reading pile. I tried to calm the swirl of thoughts. I want the house to sell. I want the comfort of being able to say, "Well, now that the house is sold Katrina is finally over." I know that selling the house is just another event, it won't erase what happened, but I want to be one more step removed from water that lives in the back of my mind.
