KATRINA -10 YEARS - "OUR LADY OF THE DRIVEWAY"

Our Lady of the Driveway

O Mary of the Driveway,
Broken like your city,
Your head lies on the ground.
A sorry sight, a sign,
A sign of devastation
Wrought by wind and water,
Angry blow and raging flow.

A passer-by, one of tender heart,
Sees and stops and mourns your head
Lying there apart,
And gently, gently takes it
And replaces it.
There. Our Lady's whole again.
Or so it seems. Or is it so?

June Butler - 5-13-07

The anniversary of Katrina and the federal flood has been celebrated(!) for a month now in the local media, and I had to stop reading and watching.  Maybe the straw that broke the camel's back was the announcement that George W Bush would be in New Orleans, or maybe even before.  Since I'm pretty well played out on the subject, I dug out something from the past.

Thanks to Athenae at First Draft for the photo and the title. She took the picture when she was in New Orleans at the end of March, when a group of us led by FD bloggers, Athenae and Scout Prime, gathered in New Orleans in 2007 to gut a house that had flooded, view the destruction, and squeeze in a little fun.

The statue of the Virgin Mary stood in a driveway with the head broken off, and a kind person put the head back in place. The photo and the title struck me with such force when I first saw it that I have never forgotten. The image of the statue of Mary in the driveway - "Mary, full of grace" as Athenae calls her - was the symbol of my destroyed and broken home town, my abandoned city, my beloved New Orleans - always full of grace to me.