A New Orleans Home, Lost but Forever Close to a Heart

You can't go home again.

How many times have I heard this cliche? Its underlying truth is that life moves on and you have to move with it. You can't go back.

There's no place like home.

Another cliche. Another truth.

But I can't go home. There's no home to go to. Not a house, not a neighborhood, not a suburb, not a city.

Katrina washed away New Orleans and left an emptiness I don't know what to do with. I cry. I have anger. I have hope.

During the first weeks after Katrina passed, I watched news reports night after night, numb with shock and disbelief. My siblings and I -- none of us still lives in New Orleans -- scoured the Internet, searching Web sites, blogs and chat forums, hoping against hope that somehow the house had survived. We got on the phone and traded grid numbers on the maps, tried to make sense of what little there was to look at.

We didn't really need the grid numbers to know. It didn't matter what little blue-lined box we clicked on. It was underwater.

We moved into that house, in east New Orleans, in 1970. I was 8.

My oldest sister, married and with young children, and my grandmother's cousin, a bachelor, descended on that house every Sunday for the traditional family dinner. They shared it with me, my other sister, brother and grandmother -- we all lived there with my parents. Dad quipped every time, "Chicken every Sunday."

Sunday dinners, holidays, birthdays, celebrations, all centered around that dining room table. My favorite part came after supper, when we would gather around the table with coffee and dessert and talk and talk and talk.

We'll never sit there again.