indignation
Aug. 30th, 2005 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7When I left work yesterday, the news was full of anxiously optimistic observations that New Orleans seemed to have weathered the worst of things and be surviving.
When I checked up this morning on the news sites, New Orleans was under the ocean. God dammit. I feel sort of indignant, really, which is sort of odd-- but it's just not fair.
I wasn't going to butt in, but the suspense is kind of killing me so I finally broke down and emailed my mom to ask whether my sister's husband's family is, well, alive or not. I mean, I barely know them; I only met them during the whole wedding thingyhoo, but Mary Bryant (adam's mom; katy's mother-in-law) and Mary Evelyn (adam's sister; katy's sister-in-law) and the other Mary Evelyn (Mary Bryant's mother) all live in Baton Rouge, I think, and really, I'm sort of wondering if we know yet what happened to them. Poor Adam. I mean, they said they were going to use Baton Rouge as a staging area for assistance to New Orleans, so I assume that means it can't be that badly damaged-- but, well, they were saying that before the hurricane had even made landfall, so, like, they can't have known that. So... I have a feeling I'll just have to wait and find out, as for obvious reasons alerting me isn't going to be highest on their list of priorities.
Dude I am so totally coherent and fascinating and am putting this so well. Yes.
I am curled up out on the couch on the sunporch, listening to the rain on the aluminum roof. When I was a child my bedroom was next to the tin roof of the back porch, and I used to lie in bed listening to the raindrops pattering. They would make odd sort of rhythms in my head, and I would fall asleep or stay awake listening to them. In the winter I could listen as the rain turned to snow and became silent; half the time I would wake to discover no snow, because the silence had been me falling asleep. The other half of the time I wouldn't be able to resist, and I would get up and peer out the window to see the odd brightness of snow in the near-full darkness of a cloudy rural night. The sound of the rain on our porch roof here is nothing like that tin roof (which is still there, although now my old bedroom is full of plants and filing cabinets, but still has a cot where the cats sleep). It's an odd sort of hollow rushing musical noise, eerie and pattering and unrainlike, and it's harder to hear from inside. So I'm glad to have the laptop now, to be able to lie out here and listen to the rain in the silent suburb (all I can hear is the neighbor's air-conditioning, the crickets singing, the rain dripping on the leaves of the solomon's seal plants by the window next to my head, and the odd singing of the rain on the roof) where I live now. Sometimes a car goes by with the swishing of wet tires, but I can pretend it's wind in leaves instead.
And this rain, this gentle quiet rain that set in just as I was leaving from work and made the dusty world smell humid and springlike-- this is Katrina, this is all that is left of her, come slowly north to give us mild flood warnings for tomorrow. We need the water; my garden is drinking the remnants of Katrina, and tomorrow or the day after or the day after I will eat lettuce and tomatoes nourished by the dying hurricane.
When I checked up this morning on the news sites, New Orleans was under the ocean. God dammit. I feel sort of indignant, really, which is sort of odd-- but it's just not fair.
I wasn't going to butt in, but the suspense is kind of killing me so I finally broke down and emailed my mom to ask whether my sister's husband's family is, well, alive or not. I mean, I barely know them; I only met them during the whole wedding thingyhoo, but Mary Bryant (adam's mom; katy's mother-in-law) and Mary Evelyn (adam's sister; katy's sister-in-law) and the other Mary Evelyn (Mary Bryant's mother) all live in Baton Rouge, I think, and really, I'm sort of wondering if we know yet what happened to them. Poor Adam. I mean, they said they were going to use Baton Rouge as a staging area for assistance to New Orleans, so I assume that means it can't be that badly damaged-- but, well, they were saying that before the hurricane had even made landfall, so, like, they can't have known that. So... I have a feeling I'll just have to wait and find out, as for obvious reasons alerting me isn't going to be highest on their list of priorities.
Dude I am so totally coherent and fascinating and am putting this so well. Yes.
I am curled up out on the couch on the sunporch, listening to the rain on the aluminum roof. When I was a child my bedroom was next to the tin roof of the back porch, and I used to lie in bed listening to the raindrops pattering. They would make odd sort of rhythms in my head, and I would fall asleep or stay awake listening to them. In the winter I could listen as the rain turned to snow and became silent; half the time I would wake to discover no snow, because the silence had been me falling asleep. The other half of the time I wouldn't be able to resist, and I would get up and peer out the window to see the odd brightness of snow in the near-full darkness of a cloudy rural night. The sound of the rain on our porch roof here is nothing like that tin roof (which is still there, although now my old bedroom is full of plants and filing cabinets, but still has a cot where the cats sleep). It's an odd sort of hollow rushing musical noise, eerie and pattering and unrainlike, and it's harder to hear from inside. So I'm glad to have the laptop now, to be able to lie out here and listen to the rain in the silent suburb (all I can hear is the neighbor's air-conditioning, the crickets singing, the rain dripping on the leaves of the solomon's seal plants by the window next to my head, and the odd singing of the rain on the roof) where I live now. Sometimes a car goes by with the swishing of wet tires, but I can pretend it's wind in leaves instead.
And this rain, this gentle quiet rain that set in just as I was leaving from work and made the dusty world smell humid and springlike-- this is Katrina, this is all that is left of her, come slowly north to give us mild flood warnings for tomorrow. We need the water; my garden is drinking the remnants of Katrina, and tomorrow or the day after or the day after I will eat lettuce and tomatoes nourished by the dying hurricane.
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 02:11 pm (UTC)I like how your mind works. :) It was lovely to read this this morning.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-01 11:54 am (UTC)Actually I ate hurricane-watered beans yesterday-- I guess the vines did have one last hurrah in them after all.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-05 02:41 am (UTC)I think that was more rain than we got the whole rest of the summer.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-06 04:07 pm (UTC)It was a hell of a lot of rain. i'm still watering plants from the barrel of rain I collected during that downpour. Which is nice, for once.