Afghans…

I’ve just completed my fourth wild afghan. In a time when knitting is so popular, I do crochet. Still, I work with yarns.

When I was a girl, the Jewish grandmother across the street from where I lived taught me to knit and needlepoint. Later, in my twenties, I taught myself to crochet from a little booklet.

Over the long years since then, I did try my hand at some needlepoint. I wanted to break the boundaries of needlepoint, to color outside the lines. Usually, needlepoint is a very civilized medium, following patterns with clear rules. I wanted to transform it into something fun and unexpected. So I taught myself textures and shaped stitches and approached unprinted canvases with the intent to go wild on them. I found myself still trapped within the confines of a flat grid surface, but I broke new ground with color and abstraction. Somewhere, I still have those strange canvases.

When hair wraps became popular in the early 1990s, I was in the early days of my jewelry business, learning to market the things I was making. I was a vendor in New Orleans’ French Market. It was a tough living. Going through the lottery for available spaces when certain vendors had rows and rows of booths already locked up… Dealing with those famous New Orleans floods, from which I learned to use waterproof plastic bins for my display and wares. In those days, I had no booth tent at all and stood in the sun and rain -- and occasionally even snow, trying to stay hopeful that enough people would buy my jewelry that I could afford to go home to make more.

In that environment, I began to notice the pirate hair wrap vendors. The hair wrappers in New Orleans needed no French Market booth. They needed only a blanket or small stool and a box of embroidery threads and some beads and a scissors. And bravery and talent. I met one wrapper whose work I admired and traded him some jewelry for a lesson in how to do wraps. He reluctantly revealed his secrets of successful hair wraps. It was my thought to supplement my jewelry income with wraps when I needed to.

I remember that when I first learned how to do it, it was very frightening to do wrap in someone’s hair. Touching them so intimately and having to please them with something they’d be living with for many weeks, wherever they went, whatever they wore, was nerve-wracking. But soon I got the hang of it and learned to break the designs rules of the other wrappers. For one thing, I owned a car and could get out to Wal-Mart to buy threads. From my background in painting, needlepoint and from embroidering blue jeans in my teens, I was familiar with the soft, multi-ply threads and wasn’t afraid to use them in unusual but beautiful color combinations. I recalled my macramé and knotting skills and incorporated texture into my wraps. I found tiny strips of leather to add. And because I already worked with beads in my jewelry, I had a great advantage with them, too.

The day came very soon when I had a list of clients for many hours on any day that I set up my camp stool at “Hippie Hill,” an edifice right across Decatur Street from the St. Louis Cathedral. On a particularly busy day, when there were many other wrappers there, I had a list of clients longer than I could fulfill in a long work day. I suggested to some that they use another wrapper, but they refused. One admitted to me that I was the only wrapper there that she would allow to touch her, plus she loved my wraps. I think that was the moment I realized that I was succeeding. In a time when a long hard day in the French Market selling jewelry would net me $100, I’d make $800 doing hair wraps! I’d never worked a job that brought tips before, but now I did. And they added to my income.

Hair wrappers always faced the dilemma that their craft was not allowed in society. I did not fully understand this when I started. They faced a Catch-22 in that they were illegal because they were not licensed, but they could not get licensed because they were not legal. They simply were not wanted. And because of this, there was no way to assure that you could do business all day. Nor was there a way to pay sales tax. The cops would arrive to shut us down, but we’d reopen as soon as they went away. One Mardi gras day, “Hippie Hill” was blocked and so I and several other wrappers simply moved all over the Quarter doing wraps wherever we could.

At the end of the season, I ceased going to New Orleans to vend. My life moved on and I was tired of the street-vending life. The cops were growing more vicious and some wrappers were being jailed. “Hippie Hill” was redesigned so it couldn’t serve as a hair wrap location. And the fad began to fade. Sadly, I folded my shop and came back to Florida, where I attempted to do wraps in different settings, getting busted each time. Fortunately, never seriously.

I’ve concentrated for many years on the jewelry business. It, too, has its ups and downs. I think I make beautiful stuff, sometimes seriously beautiful stuff, but it is folly to think this business will ever behave with the security of even the most menial job. It must be reinvented each season. Art shows have no loyalty to me and I have to scrabble my way along. Last year, I added crochet to my creative activities. I often make simple wooly scarves, but now I have also completed four wooly afghans. They are alike and different. They are wonderful. The first I gave to my parents for Christmas. The second I took to Melanie in Vermont. The third I am keeping for my own living room and the fourth – which I finished tonight – is for sale in my studio/gallery. It is the largest and heaviest of them all.

I will try to stop for now and get back to the jewelry business. It is almost Valentine’s. And now that the fourth afghan is finished, I’m eager to dive into beads, which will lead to metals.

I have not been so up and out lately. As I’ve said in other essays, artists are tired in January. But I am so grateful for being allowed to live the creative life and to make beautiful things. When I leave this world, I will leave behind a body of weird, strange and gorgeous things in several different media. I’ll not have inspired the world with my own great beauty; nor impressed people with star quality or sex appeal. But perhaps I will cause them to stop for a moment to see what my hands have made, and they’ll know something of me, and something of themselves. This is my way of expressing love for the world, for materials and processes, and for people, whom I love very, very much.

Hibernation…

Every year, once New Year’s is past, I try to go into semi-hibernation for most of the month. In truth, I have things to do. One huge January project is always creating a spreadsheet for the year just ended. I know, I know… I’m a ludite. This really should be done on a computerized spreadsheet each month. But life moves so fast and on so many synchronistic levels the other eleven months of the year that I afford myself the relief of not doing much bookkeeping until January.

I just can’t see the year when it’s underway, the way I can see it when it’s ended. Not all the facts are in. I understand abstract things in very concrete ways.

Artists are tired in January, especially crafters who exhibit in art shows. I run around like a maniac from Labor Day until New Year’s. These days I not only travel to art shows, but do many local shows plus run my own studio/gallery. My family life and couple life are demanding. I try to be there for friends and colleagues. I put on the show that is Christmas in our family. I try to match speeds with my husband, as one of his rare weeks off rolls around, and we travel between Christmas and New Year’s.

I’ve always wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. I come to the fork in the road and try to take both paths. I try to do things well. I try to master everything. I try to remain human in all of my busy-ness.

I think I mostly balance it as I prove the theorem that if you want something done, ask a busy person. But I am trying to live deeper and richer. And I’m trying to stay in hibernation until the last possible moment, when deadlines again raise their heads and I must produce. That time will arrive soon enough. Until then, I work at home, doing taxes with the TV on. Then I go to the grocery and bring home the ingredients for the evening meal. I’ve added Weight Watchers and the gym back into my regime. I celebrate the early birthdays. I travel to Vermont and then home again, where it’s really not winter, although it really should be. I miss my two oldest friends a lot, and fantasize living near them: in Vermont or above Atlanta. My friend in Vermont has identified my loneliness for me, and I agree.

When I moved to Tallahassee thirty years ago, my life was filled with people and community. But now I have raised my son and restarted my life a few times, started my second business (the first being graphic design/publishing, when I was younger), and have realized the importance of my own family in my life. I’m not yet an empty-nester because I remarried a younger man with a younger son, who’s only now turning 17. My own son is twenty-five. And soon I will be fifty-three. Is it later than we think?

For some, the end came sooner than expected. Katrina and Rita took some away; the random fatal accident took others. The landscape is changing. My relationship to time is changing. My father reveals himself as a mystic, and I think sometimes that there’s a touch of that in me as well.

Among those still surviving, connections are growing stronger. We realize that we need each other. We realize that in some ways it’s always a tsunami and we must try to hang onto one another. We realize that we must remember to smell the flowers, notice the grass under the snow, do more good things than bad, and love each other despite our imperfection. “Love is a constant act of forgiveness,” a wise one has said. And it is true.
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Subtraction…

Today I learned that Nell Ruth, mother to Craig and mother-in-law to Ann, was suddenly killed in a car accident two days ago.

Nell Ruth was a consummate consumer and a shopaholic to the extreme. She also twinkled in her friendliness and was an older, female version of her son. She was generous and adventurous and had had her moment of controversy in the past. She’d lived past that and had gone on.

Leaving the Birmingham, AL, area several years ago, she moved to her husband and his family in Arkansas. He runs a duck-hunting facility and she’d learned to live the more rural life.

Today Ann called me with the news. I could tell, the moment I heard her voice, that something was up. She had a tone I’d never heard before. We spent a moment just chatting a bit before she told me about Nell Ruth.

Accidental death is so sudden and unexpected that it is impossible to process it immediately. First comes the shock and then tears. And then the mental arguments as the brain tries to sort things out and make sense of them. Then back to shock, back to tears. The cycle is endless.

Nell Ruth is thought to have been killed instantly. An oncoming truck dropped something that came through her windshield. Witnesses will soon correct the story. Early details are sketchy. Except for the fact that she is gone.

Ann and Craig were on the road to Arkansas when Ann called me by cell phone. They were heading to the memorial service up in Arkansas, then back to Natchez for the burial.

I knew Nell Ruth. I stayed with her several times when she still lived near Birmingham. I thought she was adorable and though I had only seen her once since she moved to Arkansas, I shall miss her in this world.

I worry and grieve for Craig. Such a young man, to lose a mother he was so close to. I shall hold him, Ann and Nell Ruth in my heart.

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Crystal Wintertime…

I have just returned from my first trip to Vermont in winter. My friend, Melanie, has just moved up there. Mel and I have been constant friends since we met in ninth grade. As a child and teenager, she had visited Vermont several times as a friend to a young girl of the same age.

During our college years, Mel moved to Vermont and lived there several times. Then she went on to San Francisco, where she gave birth to her daughter. She and her then-husband moved back and forth between San Francisco and our hometown of Tampa several times, until she finally alighted there for fifteen years. There, her daughter finished her childhood and became a college student and a worker in retail.

Last year, Mel decided to return to Vermont. And so in August, she did. She bought a wonderful house on a small mountain just outside of her small town. In record time and on a small budget, she and a helper quickly renovated the house and by mid-autumn Mel’s current husband and she had moved their four cats and a dog into their new home.

I have been missing Mel. Though Tampa and Tallahassee are about five hours apart, Mel and I saw each other often. She and Terry would come to see us, and we’d go down there. We often celebrated near the holidays together. On any day, either one of us could jump in a car and visit the other. Vermont is a lot farther away! And so I had not seen her since last summer.

Her reports to me on her new home, her new life, all sounded good. And, when I visited, I saw that it was true. She and I both love cold weather and hate the heat. She has a lot of experience in snow and ice, and I am a Florida novice. But I am a natural in winter weather, though figuring out snow.

In the short time I was there, the weather changed a lot. When I arrived, it was warming and there was a January thaw. We drove around to see small towns and to eat a great lunch in an old mill town. By the middle day, it was raining, then frozen rain fell, and then a whole lot of snow. On Sunday, when we had to drive two hours to my plane, we were out earlier than the snow ploughs and the roads were heavy in snow and ice. But their car was heavy and equipped with snow tires and Terry is an experienced snow/ice driver, and so we were fine and I got to my plane on time.

The visuals of New England in winter are so exotic to me. Snow crystals on windows, the spiraling flurries of snow – with some snowflakes looking like torn bits of tissue, while others look like tiny specks, and the delicious cold like ice cream for the body were a veritable Christmas twelve days after the holidays. On the middle day, when the precipitation was falling and changing, I stayed in the house all day. I read my book, took a nap, watched the weather. That night, Mel and I found ourselves alone in the living room together. No good TV to be seen, I turned my back on the screen and faced Mel and we hung out together as we have not in many years. I think this was my favorite moment of the trip, and it was a trip of many special moments.

Thank you, Mel, for the wonderful time you showed me and for welcoming me to your new home. This completed a cycle for me, though I know I will be back. I think I was grieving my loss of you in my state, in my region. I don’t know how much I will see you in the future, but Glen and I are definitely plotting our summer voyage in your direction. I hope I see you many more times while we are both still on this earth.

I am still here, still in my life and in my ruts. I’m still in semi-hibernation, down here in the South. Having burned myself out in late 2005, I still need some mental rest. It is sales tax time and that will segue into IRS time, and so I’m busy reconstructing my business’ year in numbers. I am waiting for my muse to reawaken and lead me into new production. I have some personal projects to begin, too. It’s nice to rest after the frenzy of the holiday season.

And, while it is cold-ish these days in Tallahassee, it is much warmer and greener than Vermont. I used to be the more “northern” sister in our relationship, while Mel sweltered in the Tampa area. Now it is I who inhabit the constant-summer zone. I can take it in winter, though not in summer. Vermont, in my first winter visit, was a good test for me as to whether I would actually like real winter. I missed the super-cold temperatures that were arriving just as I was leaving to come home, and so I don’t know whether zero degrees with a wind chill on top of that is something I would relish. But I loved what I experienced, and real snow that lasted overnight and piled up and stayed was a thrill.

I love Melanie and hope that our individual changes as we live our lives do not carry us apart. It’s been an “until death do us part” friendship thus far, and I pray it will survive until the end. Vermont is a new opportunity for me to explore a new and unfamiliar realm, and to explore myself. Glen looked hard at a legal job in Vermont, which would have started just prior to 9/11. When that fateful day occurred, I was grateful that we’d not just moved to a strange new world, alone. Now that I’ve been on the ground there, I realize that it would have been okay.

So, Vermont, I will return. I can’t wait to visit the Adirondacks this summer and drive eastward into Vermont. I want to crawl all over that region and memorize it. I plan to study its history and geology before we go. It is the land of my literary dreams. The great white north calls, just as Scotland and Vancouver call. Cold, serious regions of sturdy and sensible people who still have fun.

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Paradox: New Orleans…
1/1/06

One thing I really get about New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, is her desire to be all things; to have her cake and eat it too. I suspect that New Orleans is a Seven on the Enneagram: an intelligent extrovert who wears her feelings on her sleeve; who offers succor and gives back interesting new directions. One could always be anyone s/he wanted to be there.

Her history of paradoxes continues... New Orleans is a tale of two cities. There is the city of utter devastation. And there is the city that is coming back. Life is not fair, and this is also true of how the city will likely recover – in the parts that do recover.

It is necessary to tour the devastated areas. One cannot understand from media images. To stand in the landscape is to finally comprehend how large and strong Katrina was and how many things went so wrong in the city on the day that the storm struck.

It takes only a day for the eye to develop a sophisticated discernment about the devastation. One learns to recognize wind damage, surge damage, tsunami damage from breached levies and then from rising water. All with the aftermath of mold and toxicity.

As you drive into New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain into the east part of the city, you reach East New Orleans and then the Lower Ninth Ward. The water that you cross is very close to the Mississippi Gulf Outlet and it is across this water that Katrina’s eye wall swept, striking Slidell and the Mississippi coast as well. And it is across these low lands that storm surge and high winds swept. This is still miles east of New Orleans proper. But it is Orleans Parish.

Friends report that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, white flight took white people to East New Orleans. Marsh was filled in and new neighborhoods were built, with modern construction. A new city sprang forth, complete with shopping centers and other commercial facilities that support modern life. This development did not repeat the charming characteristics of the inner city. There is not a coffee shop on every corner. It is not a pedestrian community. When black people began to also settle in this large area, white flight moved west, across the city, into Metairie and other towns in Jefferson Parish. Jefferson Parish forms the other half of the crescent between the lake and the river. There, those committed to white flight affected taxation and rules of living that tended to maintain a barrier against black folks.

East New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward suffered several different onslaughts during Katrina. First came the storm surge and high winds from the east. Then came a seriously breached levy along the Industrial Canal that appears to have formed a “tsunami” as unfathomable volumes of water poured through the levy. These forceful waters annihilated blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods, leaving them as destroyed as the Mississippi coast. And then the water rose and there was flooding. It is these neighborhoods, among others, that people cannot go home to.
I am reminded of the need I’ve seen in people who have loved ones go missing, presumed dead. They need to see the body. They need to know what happened. They need someone to bury. They need the answers to their questions. They need to grieve and shake and retreat for awhile. And then they can reconnect to something about their lives and move forward again. It is a special hell when the body is never found and the questions are never answered. And it is my prayer that the fact that people can now go back, unescorted, into the Lower Ninth Ward, to record in their brains and in their cameras what has happened. As nightmarish as it is, it is never as nightmarish as the images we might invent if we don’t get to see the reality. The reality is, after all, concrete and finite. Our imaginings can be unlimited.

Lakeview, the area near UNO, and Gentilly and Pontchartrain Park are still silent and ghostly. In three weeks, it seems that fewer houses are being actively gutted in those areas. Perhaps they’re moving past that phase and into the waiting phase. Waiting for FEMA, insurance and the Red Cross help. Waiting to decide what to do with their properties. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

How does one answer that question? I’m very glad it’s not mine to make right now. The city is coming back in spots. We ate great food, rode a bike in Audubon Park, shopped for beads, foodstuffs and souvenirs, saw shops open and celebrated the survival of so many businesses in certain areas of the city. There are invisible lines across New Orleans, magical delineations. On one side, life can be normal. Diners can enjoy fine meals and supply other material needs. On the other, it is as if Mount Vesuvius has exploded, spewing fine white powder over cars and buildings. No one is home there, and the cars are mere fool-the-eye props that lull you into a false feeling that people are home and all is well. The people are not home and may not even be alive any longer. The scratchings on their exterior walls are a mysterious code left by search teams in languages as mysterious as forgotten, ancient languages. No Rosetta Stone guides our understanding.

There will be an archeology in the future. Precious mementoes will be revealed in the muck, in a future time when seekers dig to find what happened to a lost civilization. It has always been thus. These are biblical times and the Old Testament had nothing on us.

And so the paradoxes of New Orleans are the memories I am left with. Three weeks between trips has been enough time for many new gains to be made. And yet there is a permanence to the destruction. There are too many homes damaged. There is a diversity of ideas about what to do next: bulldoze or rebuild? Stay or leave? If you still have your material home, do you still have an economy available to you to support your mortgage?

And yet things will come of this process. Art will come. So will food, music and poetry. These are a proud people. Black and white, they will follow an organic process, back to the promised land. As David reminded us: It’s still the Big Easy. The clutter and destruction make what is left seem all the more precious.

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Visibility: Zero… The Mississippi coast

This time we saw the Mississippi coast’s destruction in daylight. Three weeks ago, I’d seen it at night as I found God’s Katrina Kitchen. On that night the kitchen tent gleamed in darkness like a warm Christmas beacon. A warm place to eat and socialize in the cold night.

On this day, we dropped down from I-10 along the eastern shore of St. Louis Bay, through De L’Isle and down to Pass Christian. We were shocked to find devastation miles and miles inland, where marshes touched solid ground. Destroyed homes and trailers lay strewn on both sides of the highway down to the Gulf’s edge.

Coming from the west to the east, we saw many antebellum homes in splinters. The white sand beach looked like a moonscape. All the way from New Orleans, we’d been traveling in a white fog which made it impossible to tell sky from sea, and now we could not tell white sand from sea from sky. A surreal, milky white landscape. Flat sea, deceiving us about what she can really do when provoked by strong hurricanes.

On the day when the Gulf blew onto the land, the surge in this area was maybe 30-50 feet high. We realize that Katrina was a daytime event. People had their eyes open. It was probably very dark that day, but it was not the night we imagine in our nightmares about it.

I revised my evaluation of this area, seeing it in the daytime. Except for a few antebellum homes that were lucky enough to sit on rises and survive, EVERYTHING has been devastated along the shore. Destroyed buildings hulked in the white landscape. In a beach town as overbuilt as anything in Florida, there are only a very few buildings surviving that can have continued life.

Residential neighborhoods, chain fast food restaurants, motels, casinos, even the First Baptist Church and goofy golf are shredded.

In our day, we traveled from New Orleans to Ocean Springs, MS, a distance of more than 100 miles and the devastation of Katrina was wider than that. It continued to Bayou La Batre, to Fairhope, AL, up into Mobile, and swept over Dauphin Island. Ocean Springs experienced a lot more loss than my first visit there revealed. The town itself survived, perched upon its rise. But its low-lying waterfront neighborhoods are as hard hit as any. Homes are missing.

In New Orleans, it has been my policy to spend my tourist dollars. They’re going to be spent somewhere, and that city needs them to be spent there. In Mississippi I cannot find anywhere to drop my money on necessities.

God’s Katrina Kitchen is still functioning. In the daytime, it is a red and white circus tent. Still full of dining tables and happy servers cooking foods for anyone who wants to come in for a hot meal. I did not find Jennifer again and so do not know how the gift event went. But now their large lot is shared with a giant clothes closet and a groceries closet. Free for the taking, the food is distributed in one tent while clean clothes on hangers are displayed on clothing racks. Both the survivors and those who serve them are beautiful. People from the Right and the Left, as evidenced by magnetic car signs and bumper stickers, work side by side in service to the survivors. It does my radical, liberal, progressive heart good to see right-wingers serving those who have lost so much, instead of merely trying to stop abortion. It is humbling to me to see their warm hearts matching pace with my own instincts.

On this white, foggy day, the Gulf coast is enshrouded in a cloud. This creates an intense, small world that seems safe from the forces that roared ashore on that day, taking with them the security and way of life for brave souls who dared to live beside the open water. I cannot tell where their future will be. It is their story and not mine. I am not so rooted to place that I would stay anywhere, despite what it handed me. We are all from old families and mine has long lived at this latitude. But so many homes have faded from my life already, that perhaps I’ve learned to not latch onto place despite its legacy. Perhaps I don’t buy into permanence all that well. I envy those who do, in some ways. Who have had the luxury to do so. Me, I’m more nomadic by nature, although I live in one place. But Katrina has really taught me that Joni Mitchell was right and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. With the belly of the Gulf coast so very damaged, something is gone. I’m glad I’m one of the lucky ones who move around a lot and that I saw it all before it was over. I bear some of the memory of what was and I try to tell it to all I see. Anyone who will listen will get a story or two about all of this from me. I don’t yet know how to help a lot more than that. But I knew as soon as the storm was over that I would start going into Katrina’s path, trying to figure it out. My dear, dear region… I cry for you. But someday I will move beyond just crying, hopefully becoming part of the crew who strives to lift those downed communities from the sand.

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Paradox: New Orleans…
1/1/06

One thing I really get about New Orleans, pre- and post-Katrina, is her desire to be all things; to have her cake and eat it too. I suspect that New Orleans is a Seven on the Enneagram: an intelligent extrovert who wears her feelings on her sleeve; who offers succor and gives back interesting new directions. One could always be anyone s/he wanted to be there.

Her history of paradoxes continues... New Orleans is a tale of two cities. There is the city of utter devastation. And there is the city that is coming back. Life is not fair, and this is also true of how the city will likely recover – in the parts that do recover.

It is necessary to tour the devastated areas. One cannot understand from media images. To stand in the landscape is to finally comprehend how large and strong Katrina was and how many things went so wrong in the city on the day that the storm struck.

It takes only a day for the eye to develop a sophisticated discernment about the devastation. One learns to recognize wind damage, surge damage, tsunami damage from breached levies and then from rising water. All with the aftermath of mold and toxicity.

As you drive into New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain into the east part of the city, you reach East New Orleans and then the Lower Ninth Ward. The water that you cross is very close to the Mississippi Gulf Outlet and it is across this water that Katrina’s eye wall swept, striking Slidell and the Mississippi coast as well. And it is across these low lands that storm surge and high winds swept. This is still miles east of New Orleans proper. But it is Orleans Parish.

Friends report that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, white flight took white people to East New Orleans. Marsh was filled in and new neighborhoods were built, with modern construction. A new city sprang forth, complete with shopping centers and other commercial facilities that support modern life. This development did not repeat the charming characteristics of the inner city. There is not a coffee shop on every corner. It is not a pedestrian community. When black people began to also settle in this large area, white flight moved west, across the city, into Metairie and other towns in Jefferson Parish. Jefferson Parish forms the other half of the crescent between the lake and the river. There, those committed to white flight affected taxation and rules of living that tended to maintain a barrier against black folks.

East New Orleans and the Lower Ninth Ward suffered several different onslaughts during Katrina. First came the storm surge and high winds from the east. Then came a seriously breached levy along the Industrial Canal that appears to have formed a “tsunami” as unfathomable volumes of water poured through the levy. These forceful waters annihilated blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods, leaving them as destroyed as the Mississippi coast. And then the water rose and there was flooding. It is these neighborhoods, among others, that people cannot go home to.

I am reminded of the need I’ve seen in people who have loved ones go missing, presumed dead. They need to see the body. They need to know what happened. They need someone to bury. They need the answers to their questions. They need to grieve and shake and retreat for awhile. And then they can reconnect to something about their lives and move forward again. It is a special hell when the body is never found and the questions are never answered. And it is my prayer that the fact that people can now go back, unescorted, into the Lower Ninth Ward, to record in their brains and in their cameras what has happened. As nightmarish as it is, it is never as nightmarish as the images we might invent if we don’t get to see the reality. The reality is, after all, concrete and finite. Our imaginings can be unlimited.

Lakeview, the area near UNO, and Gentilly and Pontchartrain Park are still silent and ghostly. In three weeks, it seems that fewer houses are being actively gutted in those areas. Perhaps they’re moving past that phase and into the waiting phase. Waiting for FEMA, insurance and the Red Cross help. Waiting to decide what to do with their properties. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.

How does one answer that question? I’m very glad it’s not mine to make right now. The city is coming back in spots. We ate great food; rode a bike in Audubon Park; shopped for beads, foodstuffs and souvenirs; saw shops open and celebrated the survival of so many businesses in certain areas of the city. There are invisible lines across New Orleans, magical delineations. On one side, life can be normal. Diners can enjoy fine meals and supply other material needs. On the other, it is as if Mount Vesuvius has exploded, spewing fine white powder over cars and buildings. No one is home there, and the cars are mere fool-the-eye props that lull you into a false feeling that people are home and all is well. The people are not home and may not even be alive any longer. The scratchings on their exterior walls are a mysterious code left by search teams in languages as mysterious as forgotten, ancient languages. No Rosetta Stone guides our understanding.

There will be an archeology in the future. Precious mementoes will be revealed in the muck, in a future time when seekers dig to find what happened to a lost civilization. It has always been thus. These are biblical times and the Old Testament had nothing on us.

And so the paradoxes of New Orleans are the memories I am left with. Three weeks between trips has been enough time for many new gains to be made. And yet there is a permanence to the destruction. There are too many homes damaged. There is a diversity of ideas about what to do next: bulldoze or rebuild? Stay or leave? If you still have your material home, do you still have an economy available to you to support your mortgage?

And yet things will come of this process. Art will come. So will food, music and poetry. These are a proud people. Black and white, they will follow an organic process, back to the promised land. As David reminded us: It’s still the Big Easy. The clutter and destruction make what is left seem all the more precious.

@@@@@@@@@@


Visibility: Zero… The Mississippi coast

This time we saw the Mississippi coast’s destruction in daylight. Three weeks ago, I’d seen it at night as I found God’s Katrina Kitchen. On that night the kitchen tent gleamed in darkness like a warm Christmas beacon. A warm place to eat and socialize in the cold night.

On this day, we dropped down from I-10 along the eastern shore of St. Louis Bay, through De L’Isle and down to Pass Christian. We were shocked to find devastation miles and miles inland, where marshes touched solid ground. Destroyed homes and trailers lay strewn on both sides of the highway down to the Gulf’s edge.

Coming from the west to the east, we saw many antebellum homes in splinters. The white sand beach looked like a moonscape. All the way from New Orleans, we’d been traveling in a white fog which made it impossible to tell sky from sea, and now we could not tell white sand from sea from sky. A surreal, milky white landscape. Flat sea, deceiving us about what she can really do when provoked by strong hurricanes.

On the day when the Gulf blew onto the land, the surge in this area was maybe 30-50 feet high. We realize that Katrina was a daytime event. People had their eyes open. It was probably very dark that day, but it was not the night we imagine in our nightmares about it.

I revised my evaluation of this area, seeing it in the daytime. Except for a few antebellum homes that were lucky enough to sit on rises and survive, EVERYTHING has been devastated along the shore. Destroyed buildings hulked in the white landscape. In a beach town as overbuilt as anything in Florida, there are only a very few buildings surviving that can have continued life.

Residential neighborhoods, chain fast food restaurants, motels, casinos, even the First Baptist Church and goofy golf are shredded. Three large casino barges have been heaved from water's edge for more than a football field, landing on buildings on the far side of U.S. 90. Block after block, mile after mile, in splinters and shreds.

In our day, we traveled from New Orleans to Ocean Springs, MS, a distance of more than 100 miles and the devastation of Katrina was wider than that. It continued to Bayou La Batre, to Fairhope, AL, up into Mobile, and swept over Dauphin Island. My friend, Ann, reports that Cape San Blas near Port St. Joe in Florida, experienced damage.

Ocean Springs experienced a lot more loss than my first visit there revealed. The town itself survived, perched upon its rise. But its low-lying waterfront neighborhoods are as hard hit as any. Homes are missing.

In New Orleans, it has been my policy to spend my tourist dollars. They’re going to be spent somewhere, and that city needs them to be spent there. In Mississippi I cannot find anywhere to drop my money on necessities. These people need the things that money buys, but maybe not the money itself. They have no economy and nowhere to spend. We saw not one gas stations functioing, not one food outlet. They are dependent upon the offerings of charity.

God’s Katrina Kitchen is still functioning. In the daytime, it is a red and white circus tent. Still full of dining tables and happy servers cooking foods for anyone who wants to come in for a free hot meal. I did not find Jennifer again and so do not know how the gift event went. But now their large lot is shared with a giant clothes closet and a groceries closet. Free for the taking, the food is distributed in one tent while clean clothes on hangers are displayed on clothing racks. Both the survivors and those who serve them are beautiful. People from the Right and the Left, as evidenced by magnetic car signs and bumper stickers, work side by side in service to the survivors. It does my radical, liberal, progressive heart good to see right-wingers serving those who have lost so much, instead of merely trying to stop abortion. It is humbling to me to see their warm hearts matching pace with my own instincts.

On this white, foggy day, the Gulf coast is enshrouded in a cloud. This creates an intense, small world that seems safe from the forces that roared ashore on that day, taking with them the security and way of life for brave souls who dared to live beside the open water. I cannot tell where their future will be. It is their story and not mine.

I am not so rooted to place that I would stay anywhere, despite what it handed me. We are all from old families and mine has long lived at this latitude. But so many homes have faded from my life already, that perhaps I’ve learned to not latch onto place despite its legacy. Perhaps I don’t buy into permanence all that well. I envy those who do, in some ways. Who have had the luxury to do so. Me, I’m more nomadic by nature, although I live in one place now. But Katrina has really taught me that Joni Mitchell was right and you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. With the belly of the Gulf coast so very damaged, something is gone. I’m glad I’m one of the lucky ones who move around a lot and that I saw it all before it was over. I bear some of the memory of what was and I try to tell it to all I see. Anyone who will listen will get a story or two about all of this from me. I don’t yet know how to help a lot more than that. But I knew as soon as the storm was over that I would start going into Katrina’s path, trying to figure it out. My dear, dear region… I cry for you. But someday I will move beyond just crying, hopefully becoming part of the crew who strives to lift those drowned communities from the sand.