Katrina

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.

In Other News

After the hurricane, I really wanted a phone. A phone with a cord that attached to the wall of a house that we owned. I wanted a number that said "This is where we live." I wanted an area code that didn't fritz out because the lines were all wonky because the water screwed up everything including the towers that beamed the transmissions into outer space. When we bought this house, I got just that. I got 203-535-0014. It was good. It was comforting. It attached to a wall and had 3 extensions.

It also has a ghost. Her name is Dawn Ricatelli. The phone almost never brought calls from friends, like the one in New Orleans. It brought mostly mechanical voices saying "This is for [pause] Dawn Ricatelli." Sometimes it brought an old woman's voice saying, "Dawnie? Dawnie pick up it's me! Are you there? Call me." I called the voice once, but she wouldn't talk to me. "Stop calling. I don't know you." Or she would whistle. She has a loud piercing whistle. I stopped trying to tell her that Dawn wasn't at this number anymore. I tried to tell her it was just a number to a house with some people she didn't know. It didn't work. Dawn owes a lot of people money. The ghost in the phone number doesn't seem to care. She lets the phone ring and waits for me or the answering machine to handle things for her.

The phone also has a price tag. In this case it costs about $50.00 a month. I am tired of paying money to AT&T. I want $50.00 for movies and books and fun things, so today, I sent Dawn and the number away. Now, I just have a cell phone. It still has a 504 area code. It says, "You are from New Orleans. You are carrying a piece of the past and can use it talk to the future." That's a pretty cool idea. It also says, "You are hip and cutting edge. You are in the 21st century." That's pretty cool, too. Still, it's strange not to have a land line. It's odd to know that no one can call when I'm not home, and wait for the beep, and leave a message for me to find at some future date. Now if they get a message, it's because I haven't charged my cell phone or haven't answered it, or am driving, or ignoring it. Overall though, it means I am free of the ghost of today and can rely on older ghosts which have proven themselves come hell or high water.