hauling

Yesterday, I touched every single book my mother owns.

Well, almost. There's about twenty that were out in her bedroom. I think this means that I touched every single book she owns, with a margin of error of 2%. I'm not sure how many books she has in total, but I opened the boxes they were in and took them out and threw them onto shelves. They're not in order, but they're out, and she can re-order them at her leisure.

This was done so I could find all of my books that were mixed among them, either in the same boxes, or in separate boxes, buried beneath her books. And her records. I touched every single one of those, too - the closet was full of boxes of books and records, and I had to go through the records to get to the books.

So far I've managed to go through three boxes of my books, dividing them into ones to get rid of, ones to ship up to me in Boston, and a small pile of ones I'm not sure of. There are four more boxes of my books in the closet. And there's also a storage unit she's renting that has the remainder of my books that never made it out of New Orleans. I need to go through that and make the same division into dispose of/send on before I leave - or at least make a big enough dent that she can stop renting the storage unit.

I stopped last night because I got a paper-cut on a knuckle. Ow. And because I was exhausted, as it turned out - I went to sleep much faster than usual. Today we're going across the lake to visit Jason and Jennie; I should also try to grind through a box or two of my books. Dealing with the books is, after all, one of the main reasons for this visit.

another accidental tour of the ruins

We went out across the lake today to visit Jennie and Jason. It was a pleasant visit. Jennie finally decided there was no way she's going to return to the waistline she had before having two kids, and offered me what ended up being a large portion of her wardrobe from those days. She's a little taller than I am, so her clothes work on me. The overall feel is a bit more hippie/80s-riffic than I tend to, but I can certainly integrate it into my look - and my wardrobe grew to something like five times its previous size by this!

We chatted about this and that, Jason helped me reformat my mom's new laptop (so as to flush out all the garbage the factory installation of Windows includes), we gave some books I was going to dispose of to their kids. Then we left.

After we stopped for dinner at a very overloaded Applebee's in Covington, we took a wrong turn. Instead of heading across the Causeway, we went around the lake through Slidell, and back through New Orleans.

Or, rather, back through the corpse of New Orleans.

We drove across the entire parish* in near total blackness. There were the streetlights on the freeway, and the occasional line of streetlights visible from there. Now and then the lights on the freeway were out.

I think I saw one lighted sign on a business.

In the night, we might as well have been driving through the swamps as through New Orleans. The I-10 doesn't go through the parts that the flood spared. I could only tell we were in the city by the silhouettes of houses mixed in with scraggly wind-torn trees against the far-off lights of what city remains.

After about a half hour's drive we came into the lights of a city. We were in Metairie. We had gone completely through New Orleans at night without ever feeling like we were in a city. Now and then I'd see a row of apartments, or houses, lit by a few lights, by the lights of a car dealership across the Interstate, or by the reflections of the passing cars. We should have been in the middle of a vast, yellowish glow of artificial light. We were on a road through the darkness.

Every time I go through the desolation, some part of my brain starts trying to rewrite "California Dreamin'" to be about the state of the city. All the leaves are gone/and the ground is grey... I'm not even a fan of the Beach Boys Mamas & The Papas, but these mutated lyrics unwind through my head. Maybe I really, really wish I was still in California, far away from all of this.

Jason had showed us a map he'd printed out at work, on the large-format printers there. It was of New Orleans back in the 1800s or so. Everywhere I've ever lived in the city was in the middle of a vast area labeled "CYPRESS SWAMP".

* "county" to the rest of America. Down in Louisiana, the state's split into parishes, not counties.