Home Again Home Again

It started when Barbara Norton told me that she cried in her sleep. She's a displaced New Orleans flood survivor who has temporarily placed herself in a house in West Virginia. I visited Barbara for New Year's Eve. It was a surprise, sort of. We had talked about my going down to visit her but the first time I cancelled at the last minute, assuring her I'd come down for New Year's instead. She didn't count on it. Just like she didn't think I was "going to get married next week" and didn't show up for my wedding. I'm always changing my mind. ATNA (All talk no action.) So the surprise was when I called her up the morning before going down and began the phone call with "Should I bring my camping mattress with a sleeping bag?" Pause...She couldn't believe I was coming and thought I was just joking. It was too good to be true. She wasn't going to get on that roller coaster again.

It was no joke. I really did go visit my post-traumatic stressed friend. We laughed over Chinese food. My favorite line was over a plate of green beans, noodles and coconut shrimp. She was telling me something, went off on a tangent and couldn't remember what she was talking about to begin with. She asked me to help her remember what it was. This was the third or fourth time she couldn't remember something. It was comforting for me, actually, because I often forget where I was and have just accepted this as part of aging, whereas my six-year old finds forgetting what he's talking about unspeakably frustrating. He stomps his feet and turns purple until he can remember EXACTLY where he'd left off. "Stop the world and all the activity in it! I can't remember what I was talking about!!" He has very high expectations of his ability to recall and continue where he'd left off.


Looking for that "star" piece 

But at our ages and with what we've lived through in the last ten years since we've seen each other, I said to Barbara, who was enlisting my help in recalling her last thought, "Let's get something straight right now, Barbara." She looked at me as if she was going to be punished for something. I said "Let's just establish right now that neither of us is capable of helping the other person remember something."

She laughed. I laughed to see her laugh again. It was a great visit. We picked up right where we left off. And for someone, whose life and every fiber of life as she knew it has been completely and abruptly discontinued by this country's largest natural disaster, this continuity of picking up where we left off ten years ago was a blessing for both of us.


Good outside, Maggie!! 

Barbara got out of New Orleans with her white dog, her white truck, a few CDs, a few Christmas ornaments and the tiny television that Tamash, "the fucking genius" was able to gerryrig when she was down there trying to salvage what she could from her oil-mud-sewage laden home. Each item required a separate journey. The dog had to be retreived from Texas. The neighbor who evacuated to Dallas with him had injured him. The truck had to be retreived from the airport. The windshield and body sustained some cracks and dents. The CDs and the ornaments were from another visit and the TV was from the second to last or last attempt to clean out her apartment in hopes of getting her deposit back.

I showed up at Barbaras with my camping mattress, my sleeping bag, some clothes, a cooler and my not-yet-housebroken mutt. The mattress is tried and true. I take it everywhere and, like a tattered blanky, it looks like I do. Barbara thought for sure this mattress couldn't possibly provide me the platform for very good sleep and offered her bed with the warning that she cries, talks, thrashes and watches TV in her sleep. That's not sleep! My mattress was my preference for sure. I asked "Have you cried in your sleep ever since Katrina?" She said yes.

Barbara and Dickey Dog 

I thought about that for a while, tried to compare the extensive, comprehensive loss she's suffered to what I would cry about in my sleep if I'd lost my life as I knew it. What are my creature comforts? What are the things, the places, who are the friends I couldn't bare to lose -- the ones I'd really miss if, like New Orleans, could never be restored. It wasn't just the city that died a tragic death. Many friendships, a way of life, are over. The morning after I arrived back home, I realized how suggestible I am. I awoke from a terrible dream in which one of my best friends, who can bring me into such a place of comfort in my memories just with his voice, had died and I'd never be able to talk to him again. I visited his house and walked through. All his things reminded me of him but none of them could make him talk again. I didn't want a momento. I wanted his body to talk but his voice and all life had left his body forever. I woke up crying, wiping tears from my sockets.

When Barbara's friends heard she moved to West Virginia there were jokes in their Chistmas card emails with jabs about whether she's picked up playing the banjo or the fiddle now that she's in West Virginia. It wasn't funny. She's not where she wants to be. She'd rather be in the Virgin Islands. But in her shock and grief, a house her ex-husband bought as an investment property, is her refuge. It's not where her soul yearns to be so having those emails come through, teasing her about where she is living now, hurt a hurt that has consumed her.

Barbara keeps asking me how long it took me to get acclamated when I moved to Ohio. But that was different. I left my friends, my home, my family, my job, my stomping ground of fifteen years, my New York but I could always go back and visit. I went from being young and thin and single to married and pregnant, leaving one group in society and reluctantly joining another while losing my entire home base. That I couldn't change. It took me three or four years to adjust to the trauma. Actually each change had its own adjustment time table. Feeling like an Ohioan took the longest. I think I'm still working on that one and it's probably because of a childhood of many moves. Getting attached to one certain place wasn't something I had much experience with. Even when I lived in Albany I moved to Troy, Albany, East Greenbush, Rensselaer and Averill Park. That last house was where I could have stayed forever. I'd finally found a place I could see myself staying for the rest of my life, a job I could see myself keeping for the rest of my career, friends I would party with for as long as my health permitted.


Starting off 2006: Putting the pieces back together

It was hard to leave a well-built nest of habits. Establishing new friends was actually easier than getting comfortable as a mother, nurturer, caretaker, wife. It didn't matter that I had a band on my finger and a baby in my arms. It was still hard to make the adjustment fully and completely without the fear of losing myself. It took a few years to make good friends. It took ten to find myself as a mother and a wife.

Adjusting to a different geographical location snuck up on me more gradually than the day to day struggle/acceptance dynamic of being a mom. It isn't until I go out of state and return that I become aware of my developing attachment to Ohio. The first few years that we lived in Ohio and I returned to New York to visit family and friends I'd honk like a mad woman when I entered New York. As the years have gone by that has changed. Now, as I drive into Ohio and under the "Ohio Welcomes You" sign I honk. If I've been out of state for a long time I honk like crazy because it's always nice to go back to my own bed, my own streets, to know my way around the grocery store with my eyes closed. When I drove from West Virginia to Ohio I noticed that I didn't honk at all. Visitng Barbara felt like I hadn't left home at all but had gone home again. I hope for her to have that feeling. Home. And all the comforts that come with it. No matter where she winds up. But for now, I'm glad she's only four hours away, and, for me, part of my home.