Sometimes, when I went out of town, I didn\'t tell my mother. Somehow, after I moved back to New Orleans, having lived elsewhere for 25 years and traveling frequently on business trips, she had the notion that I no longer needed to or should travel so much. I still did the same thing to earn a living. I just did it for a university in New Orleans, traveling to and from alumni who once lived and attended school in New Orleans, rather than those from schools in the mid west or the north east. Never the less, in her mind, I was back home and things should be different. They were, just like that, but different.\r\n\r\nHurricane season was different. I remembered hurricanes growing up in New Orleans, but now they seemed more frequent, more threatening, more intense, more unpredictable, a nuisance to be respectfully considered in every part of every day life for six months of the year.\r\n\r\nOften, when I would tell her I was going away, she would make herself sick enough to be hospitalized, before or during my absence. Either she really did make herself sick worrying about the unknown, not so much about my welfare while traveling, but her well being while I was gone, or she really just didn\'t want to be left alone anymore, as she had been when I had lived away all those years. But, she was younger then and she had my father until 1995, which made just like that, but different, well, even more different. Fearful of what might happen, she would more often than not head for the hospital where they would keep her for a few days of tests and observation until I could get back to town. She loved the hospital, but hated the thought of ever being in a nursing home. She wanted to die in her home. But, also, I think she engaged in this ritual while I was away to hasten my return. I like to think she didn\'t do this necessarily to intentionally distract my thoughts while I was away, but it always did. The anticipation of what might happen while I was out of town raised my level of anxiety. Yet, when I hired a sitter to look in on her, she would fire them.\r\n\r\nI think I told her I was going to be away Friday through Sunday, because I remember telling her, if an emergency arose while I was gone with a hurricane out in the gulf she should to leave the house and go to the Super Dome, where she would be safe. I didn\'t really think she would need to leave. The Super Dome seemed like a sturdy structure in times of storms. Any time spent there would be temporary and brief, an adventuresome, precautious inconvenience, at best.\r\n\r\nWhen I left town, I was sure Katrina was headed elsewhere. Besides, I couldn\'t pry her from her house with a crow bar the year before, when Ivan threatened to plow through New Orleans, and I retreated to Basile and the safety of the farm without her, taking back roads in the middle of the night to avoid the unavoidable traffic jams.\r\n\r\nFamily in Cajun Country, somewhat appalled that I would leave town without her, suggested first that I drug her and then that I knock her out. I was afraid if I drugged her I might over drug her and kill her. I was afraid if I knocked her out, when she came to in the car, stuck in slow moving traffic on the road, she would simply get out of the car and start walking unsteadily in the other direction toward home. Ivan had been a false alarm. She was so sure it would be. And, she was so sure that her will was stronger than the might of any storm, even Katrina. There had been so many storms that season in 2005 that Katrina was just another storm, threatening the gulf coast, just another threat. \r\n\r\nAfter brunch Sunday morning with Lucinda Robb and her husband, I realized that Katrina was not just a threat. It was for real. A Level Five hurricane was headed straight into New Orleans and my mother was home alone in a neighborhood that had flooded in Hurricane Betsy on September 9, 1965. In 1965, from June 1 through September 9 there had been two storms that hurricane season. Two. On August 29, 2005, halfway through hurricane season, half the alphabet had already been used, naming Mother Nature\'s special pests.\r\n\r\nSomehow, I thought Betsy was the 100 year storm, and we needn\'t worry about a repetition of such an episode in my lifetime. Certainly, nothing worse could happen. But this was worse; much of the land that was developed to the east of the city had been swamp land that could absorb flood waters in rising tides and storm surges in 1965. There was more cement now in the city than there was then. Coastal erosion was an obvious problem now and global warming contributed to the farewell of the bayous, as well. The levees upstream that protected the city from river floods were actually contributing to the city sinking slowly over time. Katrina\'s size covered the entire Gulf of Mexico. Every element worked for the convergence of the perfect conditions for disaster.\r\n\r\nI used to have this recurring dream before Betsy that we would leave through the front of the house through the boarded up French doors, boarded up in preparation for a storm, an impossible feat except in a dream, and jump in, or rather ooze into, my father\'s car without opening the doors, which was parked facing the river. My mother and I sat in the front seat; my father drove. There were people in the back seat, but I could never make out who they were. Just as we would drive off, a tidal wave would come furiously rolling down Poland Avenue, coming from the lake. Within the wave were all kinds of creepy creature, real and imagined: dinosaurs, lizards, alligators, rats, unicorns, snakes, all bigger than life. As we drove away, rather like Santa Claus climbing into the night time sky, it would seem, the tidal wave, animals along for the turbulent ride, would come crashing down on my mother\'s house, submerging it in a burst of water. After Betsy, I stopped having that dream. \r\n\r\nBut on September 9, 1965, we were evacuated the night of Betsy, through the back door of my mother\'s house, because the front French doors were in fact boarded up in preparation of the storm, onto an amphibious vehicle, there to take us to a shelter on higher ground, parked in the exact spot where my father\'s car had always been parked in my dream. The other people along with us were my next door neighbors, whose house already had three feet of water in it, who had joined us in our house, three feet off the ground, hours earlier. \r\n\r\nWhen we returned the next day, we found our house had had about a foot of water inside, both our cars were submerged and my next door neighbor\'s Volks Wagon had floated to Alvar Street. But, after the water in the house subsided, it left behind all manner of squiggly, life sized creatures, snakes, scorpions, fish, but no dinosaurs as from my dream. \r\n\r\nA few days later, on a mid September afternoon in 1965, after I had left for school in Hammond, LA, Lyndon Baines Johnson stood on my mother\'s front porch and declared in a national broadcast after an inspection that the area was a national disaster. As a disaster, Betsy was not to be the 100 year storm.\r\n\r\nI began calling my mother all afternoon that Sunday before Katrina, pleading with her, since I could not return to get to her, to take a taxi and go to the Super Dome, take a blanket and pillow and some water and canned food, and stake a place for her self there so that she would be safe. I pleaded with her to call the police and ask them to take her someplace where she would be safe. Call after call, I got the same thing. Leave her alone, because she was not going anywhere. Then she would slam the phone down. She at 92 had lived through many hurricanes and she was staying home to ride this one out, too. Besides, she wasn\'t going to leave, Niema, her precious cat. Her insistence intensified.\r\n\r\nThere was no reasoning with her. As my panic escalated, evaluating the urgency of the situation, I faced the likelihood that my mother would die in this storm, because of her stubbornness and refusal to hear my adult voice. She was going to drown just to spite me for not being there. When she finally screamed at me that she was not leaving her house and I could just come home and find her dead, I responded sarcastically, that that was just what I wanted to do, come home and find her dead after a major storm. I realized there was no reasoning with her. \r\n\r\nSo, at 9 pm the night before Katrina hit, having made my way by air from DC to Memphis, as close to New Orleans as I could get, I called the paramedics company that had taken her to Lindy Boggs Medical Center so many, many times before, told them she was 92, lived alone, was having a heart attack, a lie, and they needed to go get her. They knew exactly who she was.\r\n\r\nThen the phone lines went dead: my cell phone, her ground line, the number to Lindy Boggs Center, where I hoped she would be taken. Communication was silenced into the city for what would be a long time.\r\n\r\nMy hope was that a team of paramedics would succeed where I had failed and would have either persuaded her to leave with them in the \"bus\" or that they overpowered her when they couldn\'t persuade her, forcing her to safety, and that she was safely tucked in a hospital bed on the third or fourth floor, resting on crisp, white, hospital linens with an oxygen tube resting in her aristocratic nose, supplying her with much needed breath, depleted from her anxiousness, and that she was having a little snack before bed time, under the watchful eye of a team of medical professionals at Lindy Boggs Center. I tried to put my mind at ease. And, I did.\r\n\r\nBut, the next day began a new chapter in the nightmare when I learned the levees, protecting the city from flooding, broke. No one was left in town to rescue anyone who might have been left behind. Anyone left, who could find a way under mandatory evacuation, was looking out for themselves. And, anyone left was sure to perish. Horrible things were happening besides the rising water, looting, raping, thefts, car jackings and killings. The third world country of New Orleans had gone mad. \r\n\r\nIf I had successfully persuaded my mother to head to the Super Dome, she would have been anything but safe. She would have been trapped amongst those hideous monsters there who were there, ill prepared for the world falling in around them along with the roof of the structure. No food, no water, no sanitary facilities, no place to go and no way to get there. What could be worse for someone 92, drowning in your home or suffering the injustices of a society gone beserk?\r\n\r\n Knowing that if my last ditch effort to evacuate my mother had failed, I faced the horror of thinking that my mother would drown or starve to death at home; she would die from lack of medication and fresh water; she would die in darkness with the electricity off from the extreme heat after the submerged central air system died, or that she was suffocating in her attic. What if left behind alone, someone had come into the house and did her harm, harmful things, unthinkable things. I was haunted by the visions I imagined. I heard stories of the water being not just brackish water from the lake, but filled with contaminants, oil, sewage, debris and remains of dead animals and people, garbage of all sorts. I thought of my mother alone in this in her home, which had been for her a sanctuary safe from all life\'s harms. I heard of people trapped in the attics or in water on the second story. I heard of elderly who died in their nursing homes tethered to their beds. I heard stories of the horrors of those left behind and I anguished about my mother being part of those numbers. \r\n\r\nI was horrified, thinking of her at the Super Dome, old, small and alone, fending for herself against the evils of society or at home, old, small and alone, dying in what had been her heaven on earth. When I left the friends and family I was with in Memphis for family in Knoxville, I had sporadic contact through my cell phone with friends and relatives outside the 504 and 985 area codes. It was through them that I was able to post my mother as missing on web sites set up to reconnect those who had become separated in the wake of Katrina, hoping that somehow I could locate her, hoping she was not still at home, hoping she was alive. \r\n\r\nThe city quickly filled with water when levee after levee broke. No neighborhood was unaffected. Lindy Boggs Center was in Mid City on Bayou St. John, which connects to the Lake. Pirates used the Bayou as a passage from Lake Pontchartrain to cruise into the city with bounty from their latest conquests at sea in by gone days. Watching news footage non stop in disbelief, all too familiar areas all too often would flash on screen, as signs that nothing was high and dry. The entire city was destroyed.\r\n\r\nThere was no way to reach Lindy Boggs Center to get news of my mother\'s whereabouts or condition, or even confirm she was there. News reports indicated that as the city flooded, patients from some hospitals were being air lifted to higher ground. Who was keeping track of that process? No one. I saw the carnage of a helicopter along Bayou St. John that crashed on a mercy mission lifting patients from Lindy Boggs Center. I tried not to think about who the occupants might be.\r\n\r\nDays went by. The city remained flooded. Communication was still mostly silent. The phone rang. It was Luci Baines Johnson. \"Darleen, Darleen, are you okay? What can we do to help?\" I had met Luci through Lindy Boggs doing work for the Lindy Boggs Literacy Center. She tracked me down and wanted to know what she could do to help. \"Luci,\" I said, \"I can\'t find my Momma.\" Luci was devoted to Lady Bird, her momma. \"We\'ll find your Momma; Lady Bird knows someone on the Red Cross Board.\"\r\n\r\nIndeed, within twenty four hours, Luci had contacted her mother\'s contact who contacted me and in no time we had located my mother in a hospital in Birmingham, AL. She was fine.\r\n\r\nThe paramedics had persuaded her to leave home the night before the storm struck and she did spend the storm in safety at Lindy Boggs Center, even though there were maniacs roaming the halls looting for drugs, even though, after the electricity went off and food supplies diminished, people were dying, and even though, when the levees broke, the lower floors of the building began to take on water. Hard of hearing, I doubt that she was aware entirely of what was going on until it was time to leave.\r\n\r\nWhen I reconnected with her in Birmingham 10 days after the storm, she gleefully announced, \"Hey, Baby, I went for my first helicopter ride.\" She had been airlifted over her beloved city. When I asked what she saw, she responded, \"The entire city was under water.\" I don\'t think she thoroughly comprehended what she saw or connected with what she said and what that meant.\r\n\r\nThe helicopter had taken her to a hospital in Slidell, across the lake. From there she was transported via emergency vehicle to the hospital in Birmingham, a five hour drive. I heard from the driver via email that he fell in love with my mother on that trip. Stopping at a McDonald\'s along the way, she ordered a happy meal that came with a little doll. She was as enthralled with that toy as a child might have been. Vivian was always charming. Regardless of her recent trauma, she could still be charming, and grateful, and beguiling and could touch the heart of stone in any man or mountain and melt it. \r\n\r\nWe left Birmingham for Knoxville. A life long resident of New Orleans, she would never return in her lifetime. Knoxville would be her home from September 2005 until April 6, 2007, Good Friday, she day she chose to leave this world. She would live out her days in a nursing home. She always wanted to die in her home, but her home had died before her. She never wanted to live in a nursing home, but her home would be one room with very few, mostly new belongings in a nursing home in a strange land amongst strangers. Not that the strangers weren\'t kind to her, they were. They were fascinated by this old resilient creature with her exotic stories and her undying resourcefulness.\r\n\r\nI showed her pictures of what had happened to her house, but I don\'t think she truly understood what she saw. She would ask about certain things she had left behind, but nothing was left, not her rosary or her engagement ring, not the piano my father had bought for the house when I was a child, not shoes, clothes, furniture, all gone. Nothing left but a whole new life at 92. She would talk about all that she had had in life, and now, all that she didn\'t have any longer. It wasn\'t with pity or regret, but more with amazement that life could give one so much and take away so much all in a flash. I would tell her when she needed a house, she had a house. She no longer needed a house. She no longer had a husband to make a home for. She was no longer raising a child. She no longer entertained. She was in her 90\'s and it was her time for others to take care of her. I would tell her that, but it didn\'t hurt any less for having said it.\r\n\r\nOn April 11, she did go home again. She went home to her old neighborhood. She went home to the love of her life, my father. She went home in a beautiful aqua cocktail dress wearing peal accessories, looking ready for a dance. Her nails were manicured. Her white hair was beautifully coifed. Her makeup was impeccable. Finally, her long journey was over, and she was home once again, forever.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n