NEW ORLEANS, LA -

Tomorrow morning, the construction company will arrive at our hundred-year-old home in mid-city New Orleans, and some strong men will move out shiny black kitchen appliances and the world’s heaviest television and truck them over to Common Ground where they’ll be used by Lower Nine families who are rebuilding after Katrina. Then the contractor will stage our house for what we hope will be a five-month renovation. Back in our new and updated kitchen just in time for Christmas dinner is what we’re hoping for but everyone I talk to tells me to multiply the months by 100%. Right now I don’t want to think about ten months and I’m going to err on the side of optimism and good ju ju because we haven’t started yet and already I want my house back.

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NEW ORLEANS, LA-

Part One

A week before I left for Bread Loaf in August, our friend, Sherri’s*, daughter was killed by an ex-boyfriend. He shot her multiple times in her apartment, and then walked outside to the parking lot and killed himself. The complex has them on videotape: Daneel standing her ground, telling him “It’s over, Manny. Go home,” and then walking back up the stairs to her place, Manny in his car, getting his gun from the glove compartment, loading it with bullets kept in the trunk, walking back up to Daneel’s, then back down before putting the gun under his chin. It took him thirteen minutes to die.

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NEW ORLEANS, LA-

I’m tutoring the Moorhead sisters twice a week at a charter school that opened five months after the levee breaches flooded 200,000 homes in New Orleans. There are 319 kids in the school, and the Moorhead sisters get there by city bus. The apartment they relocated to is on Elysian Fields. Their mom was an RN at (more…)