psalm16.8

Today, it is pouring in New Orleans. Big, fat tears fall from the sky, filling up streets to our car wheels' rims and murmuring "below sea level" as it comes. Today, people roll their eyes and tie umbrellas to their wrists and look cute in galoshes. Small talk in the coffee shop was of "cats and dogs" and canceled festivals and, of course, the Saints. It is pouring.

Count back five years, and August 28th was apparently still: the trees, the wind, the clouds in the sky, the traffic heading anywhere but here.

Some could say that today the city is crying, a non-stop suffering in remembering, of being tired of a rebuilding process that illuminates poverty, lacking systems, inequality, injustice.

Some could say the rain is a cleansing, a reminder that we can be washed anew and the past doesn't have to linger.

Either way, it has been five years since winds and water took control of the city and created a catalyst for crime, lawlessness, homelessness--unreal things that happen when our brains switch to survival mode. Katrina is now an annual event, a reason Aug. 29 is much different than other days.

The city hasn't been the same since, everyone says. In a lot of ways, that is devastating. In a lot of ways, Katrina made a city vulnerable--open for exposure, for all to see the poverty and racism here, the failing schools, the politics, the crime. Katrina didn't create those things, but water and wind and a temporary toss of hope into the "lost and found" bin didn't help. Katrina brought cameras, investigations, rebuilding, questions--the story of the storm dug deep to weave a tangled web of the intricacies of New Orleans, and that didn't always appear so hot.

It's hard for me to talk. I wasn't here then. I'm just the one noticing how often I have been stuck behind tour buses while passing the Lower 9th Ward on my way home from school the past two weeks and the more noticeable bouquets of flowers--some fresh and some dried--that line the major road as one drives into St. Bernard Parish. But I have the privilege of working in that community with those who rode out the storm or those that escaped for the necessary, minimal time only to return to water, rubble, nothing. These people are tough and resilient and talk about the storm as if it were yesterday's lunch. I would guess they see the city as both tear-stained and in attempts to cleanse. They say they want to be over it--not in a forgetful sense, just in a moving-on one. But there are little things or a lack of little things that often bring the tears. I could write a book with the stories I hear, the ones I listen to when we are sitting down for lunch and the storm inevitably comes up, and I gape and gawk and cry and have to finish my lunch at another time as the clock says lunch is over, and I am still asking questions or just listening. Because when you return from being homeless to see and feel your homelessness secured in the form of 18-foot water marks and no neighbors or possessions or schools or groceries or libraries, it's hard for that part of life not to come up.

But because of the vulnerability, because of the loss, there has been an entire movement to not give up. Not only have people not given up, but they have plans to do it "better" than last time. Better comes in the sense of fixing politics, education reform, the public libraries, levees. By no means do all feel that having their houses rebuilt is "better" than before the storm; they are thankful, but it has probably come with loss, with some confusion of community, with some this-isn't-the-same-ness. But who knew New Orleans would now have more students in successful charter schools than any city in the country? Or Brad Pitt would fill the Lower 9th with the coolest, greenest houses I've ever seen? Or that New Orleans has hundreds of organizations and people brimming over with ideas who meet to bring together the arts, green movements, politics, urban planning and more to experiment in this lab city? Five years have passed, and a lot has happened. There is still a lot of mourning and a lot of blame and tomorrow will make some people wish memories weren't so vivid, but, when others get too down, a woman I work with who lost every single thing breaks out into song in her husky, lispy voice, "this ain't nothin'." I don't know how she does that. But that, along with local kids' smiles and music blaring from the Quarter and the pure love people have for this city, gives me hope.

There is movement here. The day before the storm was still. It's not anymore. Today it is pouring in New Orleans. But we all know rain brings the green. So I see life.