I loved her before she was mine.\r\n\r\nLike a wartime soldier who listens to his comrade tell stories about his girl back home and finds himself pining for her as well. The New Orleans that stole my heart belonged not to me, but to Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy and Anne Rice.\r\n\r\nAnd who could blame me? How could anyone not be enchanted by a place like that? A place with “banana plants in the patios and...curlicues of iron on the Walgreen drugstore”, “long rainy afternoons...when an hour isn\'t just an hour--but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands-and who knows what to with it?” “A magical and magnificent place to live. In which a vampire...might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of others of exotic creatures.” Oh! How I wanted to join them!\r\n \r\nAnd so I did. I moved to New Orleans, January 1st 2005 with a boy I met when I happened to walk into a bar and he walked out behind me and started following me around. Out of the bar and out of Central Florida, which we both agreed made a continuous sucking sound audible only to people with souls. Back to his birthplace of New Orleans, Louisiana. He told me he’d lost his birth certificate and I doubted his sincerity. I suspected he’d told me that the way guys will tell a girl on a barstool things they think might impress them and then be too sheepish to come clean.\r\n\r\nTo me, this was a litmus test of sorts. A person who deigns my favorite city a wrinkled-nose “dirty” then pukes on the sidewalk and throws a go-cup in the street should be beaten in a back room with a phone book. A person who finds the smell Eau de Bourbon in the morning invigorating...well, I could fall in love with a person like that.\r\n\r\nOn the day it arrived in the mail from the Louisiana Office of Vital Statistics I ripped it open and teased him, “Chalmette! It says you were born in Chalmette!” He tore it from my hand with a look of abject terror. There it was, right there under the heading “Birthplace”: New Orleans. I got myself a native.\r\n \r\nWe were madly in love. With each other and with the city. She was ours now. Rick Bragg recently wrote about living in New Orleans “every day seemed like parole”, like getting away with something. That’s how I felt standing on the iron balcony of the Bourbon Street bar I mixed drinks in all night long, watching day break over the neon sign of the Hotel Monteleone, nodding to the hardest working men and women in New Orleans, the Waste Management workers and Iberville hookers, on my way to catch the streetcar home under a canopy of magnolias as big as saucers.\r\n\r\nWe should have known something was wrong. The corner store where we bought cigarettes and Mountain Dew from a beautiful woman who inquired about our kids, our dog, our health and knew what we wanted before we asked was closed on Saturday. On Saturday? Closed and boarded up. “Oh well,” we laughed, “just being cautious.”\r\n \r\nI was born in Florida. Hurricanes were an excuse to stay home from school, seldom-seen cousins who lived in trailer parks visited and we told ghost stories in the glow of our flashlights. Excited the way kids are by the prospect of eating Ravioli out of a can and flushing the toilet with a pitcher full of water from the bathtub.\r\n\r\nI was twenty and living in Ft. Lauderdale when Hurricane Andrew struck Homestead. That was the only time I’d been told to evacuate by bullhorn, but even then I was too stubborn and foolhardy to pay much attention. That was my oft-repeated example of how well I understood meteorology: “It was heading right for us! And look what happened! No electricity for three days! Big deal!” Homestead may as well have been on another planet, not a mere forty-five minute drive.\r\n\r\nHurricane season 2004, I lived smack-dab in between Orlando and Daytona Beach. The triple-whammy. Charlie, Frances, and Jeanne. The magnolia tree in the backyard was uprooted, the fence torn down, the roof leaked. No electricity for three weeks. I was tired of hurricanes. To Hell with hurricanes! I warned my boyfriend: “Tomorrow, don’t answer the phone.” Later, I wondered if he had listened, maybe it would have all turned out differently. I hear that stage of grief is called, “Denial”.\r\n\r\nThe phone started ringing at 10:00 AM. I covered my head with the pillow and seethed when I heard Chuck answer, “Hello?” He had been up early, had barely slept in fact, watching the storm’s progress. He held the phone to my ear and I tried to strike him dead with my eyes. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” my mother screamed. I hung up on her. She called back. And so did my brother, whom I speak to twice a year, my best friend, my oldest friend, co-workers, my father.\r\n \r\n“Look, Dad, I know what I’m doing, okay? I’ve studied the worst-case scenarios. The whole city will have to be underwater before I get six inches in my house. The Superdome is two miles away. I’ll walk there if I have to.” This last bit was a lie told to calm Pops. Come Hell and high water, The Shelter of Last Resort was The Last Place on Earth as far as I was concerned.\r\n \r\nPanic set in. I ran back and forth between the television and the Internet checking the Hurricane Advisory. The phone kept ringing. My boyfriend was freaking out. I compared prices on pink track jackets. I was in shock. My best friend was begging me to leave. “I can’t.” I said, my voice finally breaking, “ I don’t know what to pack.”\r\n \r\nWe looked for gas. We pulled into a parking lot crowded with cars in time to see them lock the doors. Someone said we could use a debit card to fuel our car and a young woman approached me and asked, “Can I please have $10 for gas.” I can’t forget her eyes or the shame I felt for hesitating before someone announced, “No gas.” “How are we supposed to evacuate without any gas?” A man in paint-splattered clothes asked no one in particular. I wonder what happened to them.\r\n\r\nWe made it as far as Slidell. I’d grabbed some clothes, my laptop, my children’s birth certificates and a few books including a copy of Confederacy of Dunces I’d bought in a used bookstore on Dauphine. Crossing Lake Pontchatrain I asked Chuck, “Did you get any pictures of your daughter?” He shook his head. “Don’t you realize we may never get to go back?” The look in his eyes told me he didn’t until that moment.\r\n\r\nWhat happened next is a blur. I remember the awesomeness of the storm, the sky raining shingles, the trees bent parallel to the ground. What I remember most is the voices on the radio all through the night. One after the next, I listened to them give their addresses...”We’ve got three kids here...a lady on dialysis...two dogs and a cat...the water is rising...I’m standing on my dresser...I’m in the attic with an axe...help us...help us...help us.” None of them screamed or cried. They were all stoic. I was so proud of them.\r\n\r\nIt took us fourteen hours to get to a hotel with an available room in Montgomery, Alabama. I would have given the front-desk clerk a kidney for that room. We didn’t know where to go. Every where we turned we would find that we couldn’t go any further. We waited seven hours in the sweltering Mississippi heat sandwiched in between an endless row of cars, trucks, and tractor trailers waiting for bulldozers to clear the road. One caught fire from the effort and burned to a smoldering carcass.\r\n \r\nWe met a young man whose father owned an alligator farm. His English Bulldog, Tucker, died from the heat. He dressed him in an LSU jersey and placed his body amongst the downed trees on the side of Highway 59. “This is so fucked-up.” he cried, not bothering to wipe his eyes. I had to agree.\r\n\r\nNo one had heard from us in three days. I didn’t want to call home. I was ashamed. I thought I had somehow caused this to happen. It was my fault. I should have known better. Then I turned on the t.v. in our hotel room. I couldn’t let my family think that I was there...in that. At 3 AM, I dialed my father’s house. My step-mother cried when she heard my voice. I was too grief-stricken for tears.\r\n\r\nI powered up my laptop and searched for news. The captions accompanying the photos enraged me. “Young man looting? Young man looting?! That is a baby wading chest-deep through flood water with a garbage bag full of groceries!” He reminded me of my middle-child, Zachariah, who turned eleven last May. I was heartsick. At 7:00 AM I finally heard my own baby’s voice. My youngest at seven, Seth asked me, his voice quiet, “Mom, did they have to get you off the roof?” How many times can a heart break?\r\n\r\nBefore we made it home with “Pray for NOLA” written on the rear-window of my 1997 Honda CRV, I got the news that my close friend Jennifer had died unexpectedly. She had accompanied me on one of my first visits to New Orleans and had spent this summer there before returning to Florida for school. The whole way I had been thinking that she would be there. I\'d called to tell her that she missed a bit of bad weather and that I couldn’t wait to see her.\r\n\r\n