The Smell of Katrina

The following is a story based loosely on my own experience post-hurricane Katrina, seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old.

My mother rolled down the window as we rolled down the interstate – at the posted speed limit, though I could feel hesitation behind the wheel. Eight weeks have passed since we’d been home, and as I gripped my new doll in my hands from the backseat, I chewed on my lip in an anxious excitement that left me with a mark just shy of blood. My house, becoming a blurry memory, was just in my reach. But when she let the air into the car, the musk, mold, and humid stench made even my two-year-old sister blink in confusion. A quick curve of the road revealed a place that was my home, but no longer my home.

“Momma?” I gripped my doll tighter as I heard my mother weep. My father reached to her from the passenger seat, and I could feel the silence of death outside our vehicle -- the strange, morbid pull that something terrible has happened.

Atop the Cresent City Connection, I peered out the window, in desperate search of something familiar, with so many weeks passed of unexpected change. I look out to find the Superdome, the indicator that I was close to home each time we returned from a long road trip. But this time away had been different; the road trip was unplanned and extended; it was filled with helplessness, unfamiliarity, and yearning.

Confusion overcame my tiny body, my mother's cries getting louder as I noticed things looked distraught, collapsed, torn away. As we exited to our street, trees curved the road in different patterns, shifting a ride I’d memorized and once knew. Houses in my neighborhood, tattered, some smashed. The wet, putrid smell of still water still coming in through the windows as I tried to place what exactly happened. Adults around me whispering about “The Hurricane” the last two months are broken up into pieces, trying to mend everything I knew together, but nothing made sense. Rain had never looked like this before.

“Remember, our house may look different,” my father leaned over his seat to face me. He’d warned me before we got into the car to make the long journey back home, but I hadn’t understood what he meant until this moment, when I’d seen everyone else's homes look taken away.

When my mother pulled into our driveway, things looked just the same. There were branches tossed in our yard, but my home was standing. I leaped with excitement from my seat, running through the grass, and my doll in tow. My parents, barley out of the car, were yelling after me. In a few quick seconds, I turned my head toward them as I ran my pent-up energy out through the yard and didn’t see the large tree trunk just ahead of me. My tiny legs fell over the lump, and I became crumpled over the other end of the trunk.

Landing with a solid thump, I glanced up above me toward the house. A window, my bedroom window, smashed inward. I froze in the grass, not noticing my doll had been launched forward several feet ahead of me in the fall. Glass was scattered in the garden outside the window. It’s full bed of flowers I’d helped mom plant earlier this summer, vacant. My father comes around to my aid, lifting me from the overgrown grass to my feet.

“The tree,” he said, pointing over to where the top trunk had fallen from. A rough, jagged mound protruding from the ground. “It fell onto the roof” he continued. “Your uncle came by to check on the house while we were away.”

He held my hand, pulling me away from the trunk and broken glass and saving my doll from the weeds grown into a forest beneath us. My mother was turning the key in our front door, and it’s as if I’d forgotten falling, the glass, the window, and the tree. We were entering our home, and I’d be with everything I knew again, finally!

My mom, hesitant and nervous, turned the knob and pushed in. The smell my noise had borne use to in the car, came back ten-fold through the entrance. The scent of stillness and humidity. It was intense, but it was my home. The pictures by the door were still there, and our T.V. stood strong. The corners of the baseboards still scuffed from taking sharp turns down the hall in my roller skates. Everything remained. I kissed the table holding the framed photos, ran my hand over the walls, and breathed in the smelly air, because at least I was home.

My mother stood in the hallway, and it seemed to stretch out in front of her, empty and dark. My bedroom door stood at the end, closed and holding everything I knew, cradled how I’d left it two short months ago. I followed her as she made her slow descent toward my door, each step feeling more alluring, yet the ominous air lingered around, and I started to wonder if I even wanted to peer into my own bedroom.

She took a deep breath as she placed her hand on the doorknob, and I shuddered as she pushed it open. There lie my toys, soaked with water that was aged weeks old. Posters on my wall, sagging and ripped. The window, pushed in from the fallen tree, the back corner of the ceiling, caving in over my bed. Bright blue walls, the color of the sky, felt dimmer and sad. My bedroom felt like sunshine, and now looked unreal, like I’d stepped into an abandoned house that would appear in a movie, although I’d never seen a movie quite like this.

I felt a lump in my throat form, although I wasn’t sure from what. Guilt, possibly. I heard every time my mom told me to clean up my toys, but I didn’t bother. Had I tidied up before we were rushed into evacuation in the middle of the night, maybe everything wouldn’t be collecting mold in a puddle on the floor, now. I knew now, seeing this display of rot and disarray in front of me, that this is what the stillness smell was. This overwhelming, scent of nonmoving water, decay from the inside out, weeks and weeks of our absence hanging in the air.

I suddenly saw myself from above, feeling a sense of disconnect from where I was standing. This tiny girl, whose seventh birthday wasn’t spared by this hurricane, had it waited five more weeks. She was empty in this doorway, nothing belonging to her anymore. Her doll, that had fallen in the swamp of grass outside, wasn’t even from home, but gifted while she was away. She’d never smell the sweetness of her cabbage patches faces, step on the plush carpet and feel it in her toes.

I was hollow, yet filling from the bottom up with the mold and water that surrounded me, lungs gasping for air as the smell became too overwhelming. This would be one of the first times I’d felt this feeling of what I described as, “not feeling myself,” a numbness, dissociated state. There wasn’t safe, anymore, because this wasn’t my home. But there was nowhere else to go.

“We’ll let you choose the new color we paint it,” my father says, coming up behind us. But I didn’t want new color, I wanted the blue, and the rainbow painted above my bed. I didn’t want new toys, I wanted my first cabbage patch, named Gianna, who was facedown with a molded back. I covered my eyes, wanting to cry, but nothing came. I surrendered to this new normal, a world I’d have to rebuild, but knowing I’d never see what I once knew, again.