Lizards and Squirrels and Birds, Oh My!

The lizards are back. Once, they populated my garden by the hundreds. I’d walk around my garden in the morning and they’d scuttle away from me, changing in a flicker from green to brown and back again. I’ve always kept an organic garden, and they rewarded me both by feasting on any excesses of undesirables and by bringing a smile to my heart as I watched them leap from wisteria to jasmine, honeysuckle to orange tree. After the storm, they were gone. No lizards. No birds singing. Only one squirrel survived: a white-eared runt we nicknamed Pablo, who became so desperate for food and companionship that he befriended us. (Yes, I know squirrels carry rabies. But that’s one problem our area doesn’t have at the moment.) He still comes on the run when he sees us, leaps on our shoulders and chatters excitedly. Nuts! Nuts! But lately, Pablo has a girlfriend, a lady squirrel who’s wiser than Pablo and knows humans are scary things to be avoided.

Then today, as I wandered through my garden, I realized the lizards are coming back, too. The garden is awash in color: gardenias and day lilies, plumbagos and gauras, a half a dozen different kinds of jasmine, mandevilla and marigolds and roses. Dozens and dozens of roses. What didn’t die beneath the briny floodwaters has evidently flourished on the nutrients the water washed in from the bottom of the lake and out of the canals. Who’d have thought?

The Reading Writer

It occurred to me today that I’ve been reading far more nonfiction lately than fiction. At first I blamed Katrina; John Connelly’s BLACK ANGEL was the first novel I actually managed to read all the way through since the storm. Yet I’ve read a fair number of nonfiction books in the last eight months. My reading time has been seriously curtailed by the realities of our lives these days, yet there must be a reason I’ve been able to stick with nonfiction and not fiction.

I suppose it’s one of the dangers of being a writer. We read our own writing so critically, constantly looking for flaws, that it becomes a habit. And so we bring that same critical judgment to the novels we pick up. I used to open a book expecting to be entertained. Now it’s a rare novel that can carry me away into its story enough that I turn off that internal editor, the voice that says, Poor Character Motivation. Predictable Plotting. Clunky Dialogue.

The other day my younger daughter came home from school. She said she and a group of friends had been discussing a new movie and when my daughter said “But it had so many plot holes!” everyone looked at her and said, “What’s a plot hole?” Both my daughters are always telling me I’ve ruined movies for them. Now I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve ruined the joy of reading novels for myself.

I Am New Orleans

This weekend at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, a miracle is taking place. It is a human miracle, wrought by human determination and courage. It is the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

There were those who said it could never happen, those who wanted to move the festival elsewhere. But some very strong, visionary people where indomitable. We would have a Jazz Fest this year and we would have it here, in New Orleans. How many of us believed, all those months ago in the dark days after the storm, that we could really pull it off? But pull it off we did, and splendidly.

I did a signing today in the Book Tent. The sun shone bright, the heat’s sting lessened by a breeze blowing off the lake. The music was grand, the food divine, the crowds thick but good humored. People stopped by our table to chat and conversation turned, as always, to the experience that unites us. How much water did y’all get? You back in your house yet? Where’d you evacuate to? But there were others, too, from far away--a lady from New York, a man from England; people who had come here to celebrate with us, to celebrate music and life.

As we left the Fair Grounds, my husband and I drove through the part of New Orleans known as Gentilly. It’s a forlorn place these days, with block after block of devastated houses rotting in the sun. After such a glorious day of joy and laughter, I felt my throat tighten up the way it always does at the sight of shattered roofs and gaping windows. I stared out at once-picturesque cottages now tilting drunkenly, hopelessly on their undermined foundations; I saw weed-grown schools and silent churches. All empty, abandoned. And then I saw a small brick house, its insides gutted, its flood-ravaged yard almost hidden by the gleaming white bulk of a FEMA trailer. And I smiled, because beside the trailer, someone had stuck a sign in the brown grass, a sign that proudly declared,
I am coming home.
I am rebuilding.
I am New Orleans.

Mother of All Distractions

I love our house. A two-story brick house with a wide second floor gallery, it’s built in a style often found in old New Orleans and Charleston, turned sideways to the street so that both the front door and all the French doors (three up, three down) open onto a secluded, plant-filled courtyard. My office is the room that would probably be designated “family room” on the floor plan. It stretches across the front of the house, facing Lake Pontchartrain some four or five blocks away. It’s a lovely room, with a brick fireplace and lots of built-in bookcases and a French door that opens onto the covered porch. Of all the rooms in the house, it was the only one that got walloped by both the floodwaters and ceiling damage. We had to gut it to the ceiling (we only had to take the walls in the other downstairs rooms up four feet). We made the room a priority, and while it’s not exactly finished yet—we’re still waiting on a replacement for the arched window that faces the street, and what was once a wet bar is still a gaping hole—it’s at the point that I have been able to set up the antique Australian cedar table I use as a computer desk (real boiled linseed oil from Lee Valley worked a miracle on the table’s legs). I’ve replaced about half the bookcases, and I’m slowly refilling them with the books that survived the deluge—along with the five boxes of new books I’ve somehow managed to accumulate in the last eight months. (The library recently had a fund-raising sale, and going to a book sale knowing you have empty shelves can be a disaster!)

I come here almost every day to write. We’re staying eight miles away, in my mother’s unflooded Metairie bungalow. It can be a long drive, with traffic slowed by trucks and work crews still picking up debris. Often I must stop along the way to deal with all the frustrating minutiae of trying to rebuild a house in the middle of a city that is also rebuilding itself—picking out tiles and paint colors, ordering mattresses and sofas. And then there are the flat tires, the inevitable result of roofing nails and debris scattered everywhere. When I tried to deal with my last flat, on a Saturday morning, I was met by a harassed man who simply threw up his hands and said, “I already 57 flat tires ahead of you!”

Where was I? Ah, yes. I come here to write. In the neighborhood around me, compressors kick on and off. Nail guns fire. Saws whirl. Bulldozers and trucks do their thing. Hammers bang. Work crews engage in their own version of the Battle of the Bands, their rival radios blaring hip hop and rock, country and classic pop. My neighbor across the street has hired two men to cut down his hurricane-damaged tree. They swing axes, fire up their chain saw. They argue (in Spanish). No, we do it this way! No, idiot, we need to do it like this! I feel like going to the door and screaming, “Yo! People! Trying to write a book here!”

What I’m reading…

Fiction: I’ve given up on the thriller; it committed the one unforgivable sin and became simply too boring to live. I’m reading another John Connolly, but the title escapes me for the moment.

Nonfiction: UNDERSTANDING THE VENEZUELAN REVOLUTION, by Marta Harnecker. Based on interviews with Hugo Chavez.

A Miasma of Despair

Do you believe you can “feel” other people’s emotions, like a faint indefinable presence that hangs in the air? Think about the peaceful calm of a cathedral or an Australian Aboriginal sacred site. Or the skin-crawling horror that lingers even after so many years in places such as the Coliseum or the World War I battlefields of Europe. Is it imagination? I don’t think so. I have caught the echo of such emotions before I understood the history of a place or its significance. I’ve known houses where the very walls seem to have absorbed the anguish of the unknown women and children who suffered there, and other houses that radiate an exuberant joy left by generations of happy families laughing and loving.

A miasma of despair hangs over New Orleans. Statisticians tell us the death rate has more than doubled. People who have lived with medical problems for years are suddenly succumbing to them; others were young and seemed healthy enough, before. Medical personnel report responding to more suicides and suicide attempts in a DAY than was normal for a month, pre-K. Even the animals are dying. So many who managed to save their pets from the storm itself are now losing them to the stress of its aftermath.

The Big Easy. The City that Care Forgot. We weep for what we have lost, rage at those responsible. We try to pick up the pieces and rebuild, but it is so hard. Vast areas are still without power, without water, without phones or sewage. Mail service in the entire area is a joke. The medical system is in a state of collapse. I talk to friends in other parts of the country, they say to me, “I guess things must be getting back to normal in New Orleans by now?”

No.


What I’m reading…
Nonfiction: LAST TRAIN TO PARADISE, by Les Standiford, on Henry Flagler and the building of the Key West Railroad. The hurricane parts are making me more than a little uncomfortable, but it’s a fascinating story.