I sat next to a woman on the plane who made me laugh out loud – she said her grandmother lived four houses from the breach in the levee and that when they went to see the house afterwards, it had spray painted across the front – NO REPTILES FOUND. Thank god for that, she said. Her grandmother, who was 95 when we all evacuated, said after a few weeks, “Well, I guess I’ve got to start all over.”
But what she first told me was that she was spending the week with her family on the Cape and was shopping when the piped in music started playing the song that came out right after Katrina – “I’m coming home” – and she didn’t even realize she was hearing it until suddenly she welped up.