She’s come undone
Yesterday, friends were over and we took a walk about around the lovely bayou. I spoke about our plans for the future, living at the LaLa and then retiring to the Quarter with trips abroad. I confessed to having been a ball of nerves last year because of my anxiety and fear of the future and now I had come to the conclusion that I must be open to any future that arrives.
Later on my neighbor’s porch, a biologist, he told me about how ten years ago he was walking around the bayou and suddenly the water dropped 8 inches and in minutes surged back up. During the plunge the water shook violently. He had to shake his head a couple of times to make sure he saw what he just saw. This wasn’t a tidal pull, but a seismic shift.
After Katrina and the Federal Flood, I returned home and about one year later, the New Orleans Museum of Art had an exhibit done by artists and photographers from all over – the wall of images made my knees buckle – the cover for the museum book was an image of friends in the raft they took out of my American Can apartment with a long shot of the bayou and the LaLa with a blue tarp covering the front (I had the original blue tarp having started a remodel three months prior to Katrina).
I went to sleep last night watching the lights dance off the small ripples in the bayou thinking about the human desire to live near water. I woke this morning to watch this video, labelled the scariest first person video of the tsunami in Japan, and I wonder about my fascination with water, about why we want to live so close to it, why Tin will just jump into the pool even though he is going to go underwater and that is scary, and about how I sit by the bayou and drive out to the lakefront and walk along the Mississippi wanting to be as close as I can get to the water.