Enduring Plum

I've felt like crying all day, which I'm sure has been a common feeling in New Orleans all week; tomorrow is the anniversary of hurricane Katrina and I'm feeling it acutely. 

A year ago tomorrow our lives were changed irrevocably. My boyfriend and I lost all our material possessions and our community, but at least none of our friends or family died due to The Storm. Still, things are hard, but through my depression and anxiety I am still optimistic that things will get better. . . eventually.

I just hope that, like the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, we are not forgotten. More lives might have been lost in those attacks, but just as many lives have been deeply scarred by hurricane Katrina. It also disturbs me that the clean up of New Orleans is being criticized as too slow, but the clean up of the World Trade Center was an unbelievably slow process and of a much smaller space; that was just a few city blocks, but Katrina devastated an entire city and the surrounding metropolitan areas.

Every time a new tropical disturbance develops, I get nervous, and I'm horribly nervous about leaving the area for any reason; the last time I did, when I got back absolutely nothing of my previous life was the same.

The president is staying in the hotel across the street from the Doubletree Hotel New Orleans, which is where my dad works and my parents live part-time (they move between it and their FEMA trailer). I wish I could just run across the street and casually tell him to go fuck himself, but I would never manage it; after all, that kind of behavior just isn't becoming of a southern woman.