The following appeared in the Opinions section of the Gainesville Sun, Sunday,, August 27, 2006\r\n\r\nOne year after Katrina\r\nAugust 27. 2006 6:01AM\r\n\r\n\r\nIDA ALTMAN\r\n\r\nMonday evening (August 21st) my husband and I watched the first part of Spike Lee\'s four-hour documentary on Katrina. I spent a restless night with dreams of being stuck with too many people in dangerous places; but when I looked at my e-mail the following morning I was thrilled to find a message from the food editor of the Times Picayune. At my request she had searched for and found a favorite recipe for broccoli cornbread that disappeared when my house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans flooded. Something lost had been regained.\r\n\r\nAlthough my husband and I left New Orleans for Alabama in advance of the storm and suffered none of the misery and horror of those who were trapped in the city, the sudden, wrenching loss of home and community has taken its toll.\r\n\r\nI had lived in the city for well over two decades, arriving there in 1982 to teach history at the University of New Orleans.\r\n\r\nMy initial impressions were largely negative. I was appalled by the poverty; many of the students who came out of the public schools were barely literate. Among my colleagues the main topics of conversation were local politics, the Saints, working on their houses, and food.\r\n\r\nI was bored, unhappy and overworked. Flora and fauna were exotic and omnipresent, outside as well as inside the apartment I rented on the top floor of a 100-year-old house off historic Esplanade Avenue. Having grown up and lived most of my life on the East Coast, as well as in Spain and Israel, it seemed I could hardly have landed in a more alien milieu within the U.S.\r\n\r\nMy early ambivalence about the city never entirely disappeared. Yet somehow, gradually, I became a New Orleanian - one who, like everyone else, brooded about local politics and the Saints, spent too much money and time to maintaining a house that even before Katrina faced a range of environmental challenges, and became devoted to certain restaurants and foods.\r\n\r\nI learned the local language and a form of social interaction that seems to belong only to New Orleans. I became an expert on the perverse ways of hurricanes (a lot of good that did us a year ago), and during every hurricane season swore I would leave the Gulf Coast, without ever really imagining what that would mean.\r\n\r\nIn the spring of 2005 I accepted a job offer from the University of Florida but delayed starting my appointment for one year. In mid-August I took over as chair of my department in New Orleans. Two weeks later our lives changed forever. The New Orleans to which I thought I could always return lay in ruins.\r\n\r\nThe city is still very far from recovery, and the same is true for New Orleanians. Those who, like myself, have left miss almost everything - but much of what we miss is no longer there or not the same. Those who have stayed wonder if they should leave, and if so, where should they go.\r\n\r\nMany who want to return to rebuild their lives lack the means to do so, and people in the city deal with problems ranging from constant power outages and low-ball insurance payouts to pervasive anxiety, depression and an overwhelming sense of loss.\r\n\r\nBefore I left the city in May the daughter of a friend gave me a little bumper sticker that says \"Be a New Orleanian, wherever you are.\" Gainesville seems like a good place to live, but can I really be a New Orleanian without hearing brass band music, dancing whenever the mood strikes, and eating fried oysters and watching the sunset along Lake Pontchartrain? The flood waters took a way of life with them, and it will be a long time before we will know if it ever can be restored.\r\n\r\nIda Altman taught at the University of New Orleans for 24 years, and she joined the faculty of the University of Florida as a specialist in colonial Latin America history in August.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCopyright 2006, The Gainesville Sun. The information contained in the Sun Online news report may not be published, broadcast or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Gainesville Sun.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\ns\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n