Everyone's a critic...

So, it appears that I am not updating fast enough for some of you (Dr. Myers). SOME of us still have school to worry about (we don't all have PhDs, you know).

In an effort to keep my promise:

Last weekend, I opened the door to the past. I drove back to New Orleans for the first time since I evacuated. The city was clearly much cleaner than it was weeks ago, so I didn't think it looked that bad. Of course, the skyline still included a brown Superdome top. It's funny how that little detail is so disturbing. I didn't drive by the Hyatt, but I did notice boarded up windows on other tall buildings, including the trade center.

The one common image in all neighbourhoods was streets lined with refrigerators. Nomatter where we drove, New Orleans was infested with rotting food coffins wrapped in duct tape. My initial thought was judgemental: Why can't these lazy people just brave the smell and clean their fridge? I got my answer when I came home.

We pulled up to our house on Henry Clay and immediately noticed the giant tree lying roots-up in my front yard. Incredibly, it fell away from the house and did not pull up the foundation with its roots. The upstairs neighbours (accept my Canadian spelling, or move on) had lost a number of windows in their front room, but we had just installed storm windows, so our front room was fine.

I opened the door to the house. Immediately, the last month and a half came rushing towards me. It felt like returning to a childhood home after a long stay away at college. A lifetime ago, I lived in New Orleans. Now, my friends had moved, my school was closed and my job was gone. The shell of the city remained, but the soul, at least as it affected my life, had washed away.

We spent the weekend cleaning and packing. Kris and I had decided that we were moving away from New Orleans. It would be a long time before that city would function properly and we did not have the strength for another evacuation. We avoided the kitchen on Friday and Saturday, but on Sunday we decided to attack. We took the fridge out to the back porch, so that we could hose it out. Even the outside of the fridge had tiny bugs on it, but it was nothing compared to the inside. We positioned a garbage can in front of the fridge so that we could immediately dump everything in it. We looked like terrorists from a cheesy movie with sunglasses, shirts tied around our faces, and yellow rubber gloves. We took a deep breath and opened the door. We closed it just as quickly when we saw and smelled the horror inside: a month and a half of summer heat and no electricity had produced black, rotted food, a stench that immediately caused gagging, and thousands of maggots. We took a second to regain composure and tried again. Screaming the whole time, Kris and I managed to completely empty the fridge and the freezer. Kris hosed it down and we decided to let it dry outside before hitting it with the bleach. A few hours later, Kris tried his best to clean this fridge out (all of this at the request of our landlord, mind you), but the maggots had worked their way into so many unreachable crevices that the effort was clearly futile. I did learn one important lesson: If you are evacuating, throw ALL food away immediately. A new fridge costs much more than some wasted food (in case you are a poor math student).

The rest of the house was easy to clean. Kris and I are packed and ready to move. We are in the process of buying a house in Geismar. Hopefully we will close before the end of the month. Otherwise, we will have to pay for another month's rent on Henry Clay. Even if the house deal falls through, we have decided to move. We will just have to find the one rental near Baton Rouge that is still available. Sorry NOLA, we love you and will visit often, but our time here has passed. If you don't move forward, you move backward and living in New Orleans is a step back for us at this point. Who knows, maybe a few years from now we will find that the siren song of Bourbon Street is too sweet to resist. For now, however, we are going suburban.