Having heard so much about Rita, I was anxious to see what my hometown of Beaumont, TX looked like a year after the storm. Driving into the city, at first I noticed little difference. Well, people exaggerated, I thought. But then we came to my old neighborhood. The place where I grew up. I hardly recognized it. Where are all the trees? I wondered. There's so much sky! It puzzled me that only my old neighborhood (Sherwood Forest, on the west side) seemed affected. But I suppose the explanation is that only in my old neighborhood did I have a vivid mental picture of how things were supposed to look: every tree, every branch, the canopy of leaves. I noticed, too, that a year later several houses still had blue tarps on their roof. It's so hard to get contractors, a friend told me. If you didn't get in line in the first hours after the storm, you could forget it.