This is an essay I wrote for my History of NO class:\r\n \r\n As I sit tonight, in my parents’ home in Bourg, wondering how I am going to put into words what I am actually feeling about my personal evacuation process and the subsequent aftermath of Katrina, I think back to Friday, August 26, 2005. I went to school that day having no clue of any hurricane headed straight towards New Orleans. As a matter of fact, I specifically remember being in my geography class learning about hurricanes, but nothing about Katrina was even mentioned. I left school, went to my house in Gentilly and prepared to go out to supper with a friend at Liuzza’s that evening.\r\n\r\n The following days seem like such a blur. Saturday morning I went to work at a lovely antique store in the French Quarter- but, for only two hours as I was sent off to seek a safer land. I remember driving down Canal Street and it was chaos everywhere, from the gas stations to the grocery stores. When I merged onto I-10 to leave, a feeling overwhelmed me that I knew was ominous. \r\n\r\n Sunday, August 28, 2005. I went to mass that morning and came home, hastily helped make last minute preparations to my parents’ home and we left. But went only a few miles north, where my family and I “rode out” the storm at my uncle’s office: a tall and cocky steel- reinforced building in downtown Houma. \r\n\r\n Downed power lines and a few, measly twigs in our driveway were all we came home to. Down the street at my grandparents’ house, with the generator running, my grandmother was cooking chicken gumbo. We had warm food, felt so blessed, and thought everything was fine. We couldn’t have been any more wrong. \r\n\r\n We had no cable for a week, but we did have electricity so family members basically moved in to enjoy the air conditioner. I had heard through an aunt that the levees broke in New Orleans and I was devastated to say the least as I quickly became conscious to its consequences. It is hard to fathom a ‘city beneath the sea’ and to hear about the atrocious, vile acts that occurred in the Superdome and Convention Center was heartbreaking and it was all just truly surreal.\r\n\r\n My charming little cottage in Gentilly is gone and it’s not even about the materialistic things that I lost that is so gut- wrenchingly sad. There was this old Creole woman, who worked at Saks 5th Avenue, and in the evening she got off the bus on Elysian Fields and walked block after block home. When she passed by our house she always called out, hello friend. Then there was our backyard neighbor who loved to fill the air with BBQ on the weekends. Every Sunday, on those hot, sultry summer nights he would play Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, or Al Green and we would sit on our deck and so enjoy our life listening to him play that music. I miss that. \r\n\r\n As for these days, frequent visits back to New Orleans are somewhat healing. Adjusting to a new home environment and making a whole new routine are all challenging; but if I just think back to those nights on my deck, the wonderful memories I shared with people I so love, that I don\'t see much of anymore and an overplayed backyard Diana Ross song filtering through the oak trees belting out “Someday we’ll be together,” I feel like I am almost back home... or someday will be again.