Losing everything: it is such a flat, abstract, distant idea. And of course, in the face of such unimaginable and huge tragedy, the victim is supposed to be so glad to have survived, and so grateful for the survival of family and friends, that material things are forgotten. And yet our possessions are not just what we have. The things you'd miss are repositories, outside of ourselves, for our dreams, our hopes, our desires, our memories, and our sense of ourselves. We carry on, most of us, whatever the damage or loss, because somehow that is what humans, with all our strength and blindness and mulish obstinancy, manage to do. But to imagine the shattering loss and damage that each day hundreds of thousands of Louisianans are still choking back, to remember the true value of what Katrina's floodwaters have swept away or polluted beyond repair, perhaps it would help to consider an incomplete list of just one woman's losses:
1. My mother's picture
More specifically, the only photograph I had of my mother (she's been dead for ages) with my brother (who is ... where?) and I. Reading us "Twas The Night Before Christmas" on Christmas Eve, wrapped in the pink and white afghan she'd knitted, cuddled on the gold couch. It was in a glass jar with the few trinkets I'd managed to save from my childhood. I found the jar in the wreckage but the trinkets had washed away and the photograph was smeared beyond recognition, a swirl of gold and brown, a memory of a memory, just gone.
2. My cast iron pans
I love to cook and bake, especially for or with other people. And I especially loved to cook with my cast iron pans. One I'd invested in while working at the Cass Corridor Food Co-op, I ordered it special and felt so independent and grown up when I took it home and seasoned it. I can't tell you how many meals were cooked in that thing. It had such a strong and savory personality - and anyone who knows knows that cast iron is just like that, specific to who cooks in it, a very subjective tool. I'd been given a giant cast iron stew pot by Herman and Jenny for my birthday the year prior and had made amazing batches of red beans, jambalaya, soup and stews in it - the kind of food that would get scraped off the bottom and then fingers would swipe over it to get the last remaining traces. They were underwater for 3 weeks and utterly destroyed, rusted and toxic, when I finally found them.
3. Phoebe the Cat
I have fed tons of strays throughout the years but some of them you just know are meant to be your very own pet. Or rather, I'm meant to be theirs. Phoebe was one of those - a fiesty, flirty, fluffy tortoise shell wonder who I'd managed to coax off of rooftops & treetops to feed on the porch. We'd gotten to the point where I could be swinging on the black glider and she would wind inbetween my legs, finally lying down at my feet to watch the night come down. The day I evacuated I spent hours looking for her and when I found her my gestures of trying to pick her up, intensifed by what I'm sure she could hear as great anxiety in my voice, freaked her. The last I saw of her she was perched on the tin roof of the shed across the street, her big fat tail swishing back and forth, her yellow eyes flashing in the sun.
