After three weeks in southeastern Texas, my son Dylan and I were starting, at least somewhat, to settle in. We had transferred Dylan to an Episcopal Montessori School in Houston, which seemed to be working out beautifully (each afternoon when I picked him up, his teacher would claim that he behaved as if "he has always been here") and I was beginning to write again. Meanwhile, in recognition of the fact that three weeks with family, no matter how affable, can take its toll on anyone, my husband, Chris, and I had also begun our search for a sublet for the semester, or until our home was hospitable enough for us to return.

Chris, however, was still pining for our life in New Orleans and optimistic about the city's recovery. We had, only a few months prior to Katrina, renovated a nineteenth century Victorian double, a dream for both of us, and Chris had done the vast majority of the work himself. More to the point, during the six years we had lived there, we had both fallen in love with the city's infamous joie de vivre; its late night music, art, and color. Nevertheless, unlike Chris, I had reservations about returning to stay or even to visit. The looting we had witnessed on TV and the news of our neighbors' defensive gun battle had confirmed an ambivalence I had developed since the earliest days of my pregnancy. Ever aesthetic to artists, epicureans, and tourists alike, New Orleans had been, throughout its history, ripe with racial and class conflict, such that, no matter how much I enjoyed its celebrated diversity, I would always fear for the welfare of my son. The conflict began at the ground level with the unbridgeable gap between an abjectly poor public school system, run by an historically corrupt board of largely middle class blacks, apparently unwilling or unable to uplift the masses of less fortunate African Americans (a reality that was verified almost daily by the local newspaper's reports of its underhanded operations and unsavory politics) and an obscenely expensive selection of private schools for the city's white and black elite and extended to the sprawling presence of large unlivable projects that seemed to abut most "good" and increasingly unaffordable neighborhoods in the city, all of which contributed the kind of rage and pathology that led certain individuals to murder and pillage.

Even after we had moved from our bohemian neighborhood in the historic Marigny (an area by the French Quarter, much beloved by artists, musicians and a various assortment of social outsiders) to the more family oriented, but still historic, home of our Victorian "fixer-upper" on the West Bank, I harbored a certain anxiety about the healthfulness of this environment for my son. Of course I wanted him to grow up in a multicultural community. But I feared, simultaneously, that he might, like so many others, young and old, be harmed by the violence of a city that, in most 2005 surveys, also ranked as the nation's murder capitol. Just that summer, a 20-year old Korean cashier at our neighborhood grocery had been shot and killed on a Saturday afternoon by an African-American teenage boy before she was able to open her cash register. There were two other murders within one week one street over. Such incidents occurred with increasing frequency and left me contemplating nervously my family's future.

Still, when we heard on the news that our neighborhood would be opened back up for residents to return, Chris determined that he should drive back to check on our house and bring back some of our belongings in order to set up temporary shop in Houston. He left on a Saturday afternoon with plans to return on Sunday night. On Sunday he called and, in a voice that sounded oddly distant, informed me that he wanted to remain an extra day. He reported that our electricity was on, water was running and that he was able to receive calls. In addition, the neighborhood coffee shop was open and had become something of a community center for survivors of the storm. Except for getting lost amidst Houston's maze of highways on our way to the Children's Museum Saturday, Dylan and I were faring well and so I accepted this change in itinerary without further reflection.

The Chris who returned the next night, however, was no longer optimistic about the city's recovery. Rather, the man who appeared to Dylan and me was visibly shaken and the stories he related of what he had seen, and what he'd heard from residents who'd stayed, were chilling and sad. New Orleans, he said, was mortally wounded, a shell of a city, much of it submerged in a toxic black sludge that had appeared when the waters receded. The only apparent life as he drove away from our neighborhood, a kind of island apart from the devastation, were the Humvees patrolling the city's streets and helicopters circling overhead. As he drove through the downtown, the former heart of New Orleans, Chris was stricken by the alarming spectacle of debris on the interstate overpass—the boats, toys, and furniture that lay strewn in odd and unexpected corners, amidst uprooted trees or broken telephone poles, pressed up against the side of access ramps. He had to swerve, Chris told me, to avoid a tricycle in the middle of the road.

At the sound of his car easing into the driveway later that night, Dylan and I, still awake and restless, bounded into the front room to greet him. "I am just so happy to see you," Chris exclaimed, as he walked in the door, hugging us deeply.