SEASON OF THE WITCH IN NEW ORLEANS

The Season of the Witch
By
Debbie Lindsey
On August 29th 2005 the manner in which we gauge time changed – maybe forever. We all switched 05 to 06 and then again to 07 when dating logging and documenting time. But I suspect on some level, August 28th will forever be our apocalyptic New Years Eve and the 29th our forever altered New Years Day. Our fiscal calendars seem to revolve more around August now. Even the written-in-stone tax day of April 15th was changed briefly for us. Our sense of seasons has perhaps changed too? For me there are two seasons: the six months of Hurricane season and the six months leading up to it.
Was it like this for New Yorkers? Will September 11th always mark the emotional calendar for that city? Do survivors of the Tsunami now tell time from clocks manufactured in the Twilight Zone? And let us never forget the near total obliteration of town after town after town of our Mississippi coast. Whole swaths of human occupation gone forever – nothing to gut, raise, or restore. Gone. We here are not alone in our experience of post-war-like survival. For many folks and many reasons conventional timetables have become trivial. Life is a montage of before and after.
For me, the before of that August and the subsequent after with its altering of land and lives, has been nothing if not an education and experience into the environs of my city I had previously overlooked. My eighteen years in New Orleans had not prepared me for the lessons learned since the water came. Nor, would I have imagined the changes to come, as I stood there on Canal Street that Tuesday of that August as water and civil unrest began to flow.
Not everyone is able to make lemonade when bombarded with lemons. Sometimes the fruit is rotten, the water tainted, the pitcher cracked. But some folks were able to grab onto a twist of fate and survive, even flourish.
Amy.
Amy Cyrex Sins was just 29 when her brain child, Ruby Slippers Cookbook – Life, Culture, Family & Food After Katrina received the 2006 Gourmand Award; sold its way into a third edition; and contributed its first contribution of $10,000 to the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. This would be a hard act to follow on a good day, but Amy’s home was ten houses from the 17th Street Canal breach and we all know what that means. I can merely remember what a loser I must have been at 29. I am not sure I could’ve produced a decent glass of lemon aid under the best of circumstances then much less one as tasty as Amy’s.
Ruby Slippers is neither saccharine nor sour. It simply shows how life limps on amid the new landscape and the small joys that are ever present. Amy is quick to remind us of just how many people assisted in this creation and I can only guess that they too exacted something more than muck and mold to hold onto in this new world, new time.
Time is measured differently now and moves hatefully slow for many. Waiting, waiting constantly for help to come from the powers-that-be as they plan plans and study studies. For many, time moved forward with unnatural speed. Death came unscheduled to many.
But not to Bob.
Bob came to us six months before time went askew. He was homeless and smelled of death. One veterinarian put him at about 12 to 14 years old. We believed Bob was dead but that no one had had the heart to tell him yet. During those crazy hazy days of summer while we waited for a way out of what was left of town, Bob was beginning to starve and dehydrate. This had less to do with our being stranded as with our personal shut down. Poor Bob was already suffering from a lack of competent vet care and diagnosis and now he was at the mercy of our preoccupation with stuff we’d never encountered before.
Then I kinda snapped out of my stuff and realized he was going down. He seemed to have forgotten how to eat or swallow. We began to hand feed and water him. He held his own from then on throughout our eventual evacuation and hiatus from drama. As soon as we returned to New Orleans he was upgraded from the “you, Mr. Stray Cat, are lucky to be off the streets, here’s minimum care till we find you a home” to….a really good vet.
August 29th is not an anniversary of a disaster for Bob, but rather the slow but steady immersion into our family. And he grew younger! Bob’s new vet announced him to be no older than nine and quickly treated an ailment that had most likely plagued him for years. Bob now enjoys a new career as host at our book shop and holds the enviable title of Employee of the Month – every month.
There were others not so lucky as Bob to benefit from the storm . But thanks to one woman, many were saved and some feral cats even got a leg up for the first time in their homeless lives. This person, Celeste Gilbert, a local veterinarian, gave me the privilege of riding shotgun with her. It was our job to feed and water the animals left behind. Our forays into utterly deserted, still wet, dying neighborhoods were an education of the senses.
I would stand in the middle of a street totally deserted with not a sound of man or machine and watch sunset give way to utter darkness and hear only the sound of mosquitoes or a dog baying. I peered inside a home at the remnants of a last meal; watched helpless as a building burned because the cell phone lines were jammed; learned to step over a decomposing dog and not vomit; and stood in the center of a once notorious housing project and felt oddly safe.
Celeste showed me courage and trust (both traits needed to hand feed a stray pit bull). And our renegade rides showed me this city’s vastness, beauty, poison, pain and allure.
Are we destined to relive that August and the mutated months that followed forever? But, to move on, to let it go, would also mean forgetting the once in a lifetime acts of heroics, kindnesses, and sheer mind blowing experiences. This was a gift given to me by a storm and flood, in the season of the witch.