Coming Home

"What do you think about moving back home?" Those words made my heart race, took my breath away. I wanted to cry. My husband was asking me if I wanted to move back to the city that another woman drove me out of; the city that failed to provide adequate education to my children; the city that in retrospect, I truly loved.

I didn't know how to respond, I was shocked, afraid, sick to my stomach. I lived in New Orleans most of my life, thirty-nine years at that point. Although we lived in Slidell, Louisiana when the storm hit, we still considered ouselves residents of New Orleans.

We evacuated early Sunday morning (like midnight, one a.m.), August 28, 2005, taking enough clothes for 3 days or so. We went home about two weeks later, though we weren't supposed to, to assess the damage to our home that we had only been living in for a year. At that point I knew that our lives would never be the same again. I knew that we would never live in New Orleans again.

I guess I was wrong. It has been five years since the devastation and to be honest, there is no place like home and no place like New Orleans. We lived in Dallas, Texas for a little over a year and Cypress, Texas for more than three years; we thought we were home... it was home, temporarily.

When I lived in New Orleans, I never thought about the great and unique things about the city. The architecture, the people, the food, the culture. Whenever I told someone that I was from New Orleans I felt a strange sense of pride, not really pride like you might think, but like I'm somehow different because I'm from there. We have a different thing going on here, we are just different. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so good. When me and my husband say "only in New Orleans" it means something different everytime.

I'm gonna end this blog now, but I will be posting more in the future. All about my city....so you can love it too!

Check out my other blog at http://knowitall-donnaanne.blogspot.com/