Come hell and high water

Most of the time, it's just a hill.

From my driveway to the levee

A nice grass-covered hill barely 200 yards from my my little cottage with the white picket fence. It's on my right when I drive east, on my left when I'm heading west; green in the spring and summer, a strange shade of tan in the winter.

Lots of people use it for exercise, climbing up to the top to reach the path for walking and biking. I don't go up there much because the section near us hasn't been paved yet. The terrain is rough and the rocks hurt both my feet and my dogs'.

So most of the time I don't give much thought to what's lurking just on the other side of that hill. Not until lately.

The Mississippi River on the left, my town on the right.

The Mississippi River.
The MIGHTY Mississippi River.

The very, very dangerous Mississippi River, swollen with record rains and snow melt and bulging against its grassy seams. Bursting in some cases, taking away homes and livelihoods and dreams.

And sometimes, I admit, I forget that it's there, just a few hundred yards from where I live, where my family lives.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Oh we get a kick out of the fact that we can stand in our driveway and wave to the ship captains some days. Until we realize, that's because the river is actually higher than our house.

But now we are remembering what that hill really is and why it's there.

And that's why today I am loving that little green hill we call a levee and hoping and praying that it is a well-built and very strong hill.

If it were not there, my house and all that I own would be part of the Mississippi River. Driftwood.

Last week they opened the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which is located about a mile from my house, unleashing millions of gallons of Mississippi River water on an unimpeded path towards Lake Pontchartrain. I even got to cover it for the newspaper, interviewing a bunch of school kids who were playing hookey.

Today, further north, they opened the Morganza Spillway to unleash more river water, which will swamp thousands of acres of farmland and many homes -- some in my hometown. To save New Orleans.

Meanwhile, all that river water is climbing to the tops of the levees that surround our little town.

As we hope and pray that the hills will hold.

The Bonnet Carre Spillway in Norco.

Two years later

I was not in New Orleans on August 29, 2005.  In fact, I was far, far away, in Natchitoches, LA., safe and dry in a cozy but cramped apartment with my stepdaughter, her two roommates, my husband, my daughter, my husband's ex wife and her husband.

I don't even live in New Orleans, but in a suburb. A nice, safe,  high and dry suburb that escaped the wrath of Hurricane Katrina unscathed.

I only spent a week in my self-imposed exile.  I returned to my house five days later, cleaned out the fridge, spotted the mouse that had moved into my kitchen and went to a friend's house for a few hours until the turned my electricity back on. That night I slept in my own bed. But I had to go days without cable.

I did not lose everything I owned. In fact, I did not lose anything I owned.

Well, does one's sense of security count?

I now spend my summers making mental lists of what I must pack when there is a hurricane in the gulf. I find myself mentally filing away the names of hotels along the way when I drive out of town. They are potential places of refuge. I have spent two years scanning in my old photos onto my computer. I have bought a DVD recorder but have not yet begun transferring all the video to disk.

I have Lora Leigh's special things in a stack so that I can snatch them up quickly -- her  Lora Day Box which contains all the keepsakes from her finalization day, her baby box, her baby book, her two scrapbooks. She's only 6. She hasn't accumulated as much -- YET.

I have prioritized my own -- the lock box, the bill basket, the hard drive, the wedding album, the one photo album that has pictures of my brother and me as children, the two books I've written but haven't published yet, the French silver, the silver tray, the videos and as many photos as I can cram into whatever space we have.

I also have a brand new canvas luggage holder for the top of my car -- so I can pack more stuff.

And I have a 6-year-old who is still traumatized.  She is terrified of the daily average thunderstorm. She plays "evacuation" with her friends. She has nightmares about the day another storm comes our way and we have to leave. She won't let me watch any of the anniversary stuff on TV.

It is two years today since Hurricane Katrina tried to destroy the city of New Orleans, the mother ship of  us suburbanites. We who are counted among the metropolitan area's population, and who count ourselves, count on that city for much of our existence. We count on it for our culture, our way of life, our uniqueness in this world and, well, for our jobs.  It is our tether, our home base.

Katrina cut us off for a while, but the ties have not been severed. I have been there. I am not afraid to go there. I just don't like to drive there.