BRATTLEBORO — My husband and I were finally allowed back in New Orleans two months after the levees broke.
The entire city was gray and looked like the epitome of a ghost town. The biggest tragedy was witnessing the markings on the homes that indicated lives lost, one of which happened to be across the street where we lived.
All that seemed to be alive were swarms of gnats that greeted us as we approached our home.
We had to be covered from head to toe to enter. We could barely walk through without tripping due to the buckling of our floors, and the stench was unbearable.
We took pictures of the mold on the walls, remnants of Lake Pontchartrain, which filled up the house 4 feet deep. The lake dragged along with it anything it could collect through its violent journey through the neighborhoods until it found its resting place in seething heat.
Most everything we owned had been submerged in this toxic stew, including my piano, which I could never lay a finger on again.
The piano, the shelf with all the music books and various instruments, and the Marcus Uzilevsky print on the wall are stark reminders of what was most important to me in New Orleans.
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Music. My life was submerged in it. It was my livelihood, it was my identity, it was the thread that connected me with my musical peers: mentors and legendary artists who were just regular people.
I cultivated love and friendships from musical collaborations with those musicians and with my fans, who were admirers of music and lived for it just like me.
WWOZ, the radio station where I hosted a blues show for more than 10 years, was another conduit to sharing and expressing my passion for music and connecting with other music makers and music lovers.
That radio station is where I met Chris, my husband. Music was what we had in common.
It's his print on the wall above my piano. We loved this house.
It's where Chris proposed to me. We eloped and got married by the very lake that landed in our house only six months later.
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I haven't lost my identity or my passion. I love our new home in Vermont and my new friends. I have a new piano.
But I miss our house, and I miss our lives in New Orleans.
There are people I love there, people whose relationships I've cultivated over most of my life, people who within the past 10 years have taken a journey to a new frontier and therefore will now only be a memory. The longer I stay away, the more that number continues to grow.
My things I can acquire again, my career can continue. But the people of New Orleans - especially those I'll never see again - are irreplaceable.
If it wasn't for Katrina, I might have had one last song, or one last conversation, or I might have been able to embrace them in the flesh.