1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose Page B

throw a snowball, catch flakes on their tongues.
    That was a nice finishing touch.
    But I’m tired of spending all my life surrounded by good-byes. That’s a lyric by Fred LeBlanc, the Cowboy Mouth drummer, but it captures my core right now. Every day, it seems, it’s good-bye to somebody.
    But bringing my family home also brought with it the very welcome sound of hello. It was a sound I needed to hear. Hello to all—well, some—of our old New Orleans friends and neighbors.
    And it’s funny: it wasn’t until my wife and kids walked into our house that I realized I had been living with a bunker mentality for a long time.
    For instance, I had cleaned out our refrigerator months before, but the shelves were still in the backyard. My back deck was still a repository for seven red gas cans, even though I hadn’t run a generator since September.
    My closet and drawers were almost exactly as they had been the day we evacuated; I have worn two sets of clothes since everything went down. Jeans, T-shirts. I look at the suits hanging in my closet and wonder what use I’ll ever have for them again.
    What did I used to do?
    Some folks say it’s insane to bring children into this environment, this beaten-down town, and certainly there is merit to that argument.
    Is it depressing here? Yes. Is it dangerous? Maybe. The water, the air, the soil . . . I don’t know.
    And there’s little doubt that the kids have picked up the vibe. My six-year-old daughter started writing a book this week—a writer in the family!—and she has a page about the hurricane in it and it says, “A lot of people died. Some of them were kids.”
    Mercy. God in Heaven, what lives are we handing to these children of the storm?
    Then again, there is much about the aftermath that amuses them greatly. For example, where adults see rows and rows of spoiling refrigerators fouling the side of the road, children see mountains of empty appliance boxes to replace them.
    It used to be that when a neighbor on the block bought a major appliance—a once-a-year event—we would commandeer the box and make four or five days of fun out of it. A fort. A playhouse. A cave.
    With all these empty boxes around, I thought it would be nearly criminal not to make some lemonade out of all these lemons bestowed upon us, so I borrowed a friend’s truck and brought six refrigerator boxes home and built a Christmas village for the kids.
    They disappear for hours. In all the muck, you gotta dig for the magic.
    When we drove to City Park the other night to look at the holiday lights, we plowed through blighted streets, total darkness, total loss and devastation on the sides of the road.
    â€œOoh, scary!” was all my son could muster. They thought it was pretty cool, actually, and I’m not going to call them out on that and tell them that in fact it’s not. In due time, they will find out.
    They will learn what went down in this town.
    They see the ubiquitous brown stain that marks where the floodwaters settled for three weeks, and they see not the criminal failure of the Army Corps of Engineers but . . . a bathtub ring around the city.
    What other place has that?
    They love this town, my kids. They had a blast in Maryland, but they all said they wanted to come home and they’ve not said otherwise since they got here.
    They know that Al Copeland’s house is all lit up for the holidays like some crazy Disney castle and they know we’ll go check it out this week, and that alone, for them, is a reason to live here.
    They’ll go back to their schools in January, and we will move on.
    It’s a big deal, what’s happened here and what lies ahead. Rebuilding this city is history in the making, and my family—as we’re fond of singing around here—is going to be in that number.
    This is not just Anywhere USA we’re talking about. This is New Orleans. This is our home.