Hurricane Katrina
Julie is a native of New Orleans. Her family home was destroyed in the Hurricane Katrina and she and her family lost almost all of their personal belongings when the house filled with over 7 feet of water.
Text Box: Waiting for the Light Julie Whitlow 2005 For the first time since I moved to Salem 15 years ago, I won’t be going back home for Christmas. The levees broke and my hometown drowned. As I scan boxes of neglected photos that didn’t make it into albums to create a book of memories for my mother, I pause at the many shots of past Christmases. They are all similar, familiar. Hairstyles change and faces become a bit more wizened but the artifacts are all there, lost forever but for these wrinkled Kodaks. The little electric Tyco train that rumbled around the tree for over 40 years, drowned. My mother’s prized collection of wooden incense burners, happy figures puffing rooms full of holiday scent, drowned. Stored too low, they lay broken and soggy, amidst other trinkets and treasures, heaped under pieces of ceiling and wall, waiting for the demo crew. The wind-up Santa whose clanging bell and tinny ‘ho ho hos’ made the little ones shriek, drowned. The Christmas table linens, passed down through time, drowned. The crčche, carved from jacaranda wood in Brazil, saved, but packed away in a storage unit along with the sludge-coated pieces of wedding china and crystal glasses that didn’t break when the furniture crumbled. My grandmother’s piano, the one where I tapped out Silent Night for my father as he lay dying last year, a heap of scraps. The memorabilia of our lives are all in the photos, but most of it is gone, drowned in nine feet of brackish water, polluted with the stench of human error, miscalculation, and the skewed priorities of government run amok. Torn for the past 15 years between New Orlenian and New England sensibilities, I am finally a Salemite. I only have one home. My mother, after 48 Christmases in New Orleans, will have her first in the Willows and tradition will begin anew. How will it ever be as nice? Should Christmas Eve gumbo be replaced by lobster pie? I don’t even have a Christmas table cloth. The sure thing is that there won’t be any guesses about the weather; from now on it will be cold, maybe with snow. My girls will not go outside barefoot and jump on a new pogo stick like I once did, the balmy air from Lake Pontchartrain making the words ‘white Christmas’ seem like a vague image from another world. But, hey, Christmas is supposed to be cold and snowy, the kind that people dream of. Not prone to sentimentality, I unpack our Christmas box and admire the mementos of our lives with a newfound reverence. I hang my old stocking, the one that my second daughter Mattea now uses, and remember. It was hand-sewn by ‘Grandmother’ Celeste, and is adorned with tiny colored beads that shape the long skirt of a little girl. It seems now like a priceless relic, one of the few links to my childhood. We bought Marina’s for her at a crafts fair before her first Christmas; it was made in Peru. I will tell her about it and let her know why it’s special. As the darkest days descend, we will join hearts, cry over the photos that link us to the past, and tell ourselves once again that we still have what is really important. And we will wait for the light to return.
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