I am nine minutes into the start of my 44th year, and I believe I spent my birthday in what would be assessed, objectively, as a graced state. We have running water. Our cell phones sometimes find signals here in New Orleans after Hurricane Gustav, and I was able to talk to my father in Missouri and to CBC radio in Toronto between service gray-outs. We have no air conditioning, but my husband Joseph disconnected the extension cord that powered the surge board that protected our laptops and moved it to the microwave in order to heat me up a bowl of soup, my welcomed birthday dinner. We have a sofa in our kitchen, mummied artwork in closets, and a horrible loud noise in the backyard.

Yeah, we bought a gas-powered generator before Hurricane Gustav. Joseph and I weren’t particularly flush, but we’d not been able to decide if we’d be staying or going. Now, having returned after fleeing, the night is grotesquely balmy, to be generous. The neighborhood squats dark and powerless and eviscerated of human life, much the way it must have been before our bayou, two blocks over, wended its way towards the shallow lake. Our old house carries heat like a pregnant woman and is missing roof shingles like some sad meth addict does teeth. This morning, I took out huge pruning shears, the kind they use to chop off fingers in movies—maybe in real life—and neatly clipped all the felled crape myrtles we’d just planted, the fronds of toppled palms.

Honestly, at this pitch black moment, sitting in front of the singular glow of my thin computer, I do not know, definitively, why we choose to live here. I want to live out my fiction, to believe my opening line: “We choose New Orleans.” Yes, I guess, somehow, we are choosing the city, to return to it, if only that, but right now Hurricanes Hanna and Ike and Josephine line themselves up, courtesans, the all of them, with me, the tired wife, too weary to do much about shoring my defenses. Los Angeles, San Francisco, you have your earthquakes. Florida, you’re used to this whipping madness. My sister’s Nebraska home was hit dead-on by a tornado last month. Tsunamis, volcano ruptures, the banes of our friends afar. My second hurricane misery in three years isn’t really all that catastrophic by regular comparison.

So what’s my deal? Why am I nearly comatose with inertia? Joseph found me earlier, some 16 hours into my proper birthday, lying on our overly balmy hardwood floor staring at our overly balmy recycled shag rubber area rug. Ants would love the thing. I imagine them in there, in their little ant homes free from the gravity of hurricanes, and wonder what’s gone so damn wrong with it all.

Tonight, the moon is an almond sliver in the small window at the top of our damaged house. I have spent hours by flashlight reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “[S]he picks an ice cube out of the bowl and pops it into her mouth. This is an unusual thing for her to do. I’ve never seen her nibble while working. ‘You can have one of them too,’ she says. ‘A shame, making you wear all them pillowcases on your head, in this weather.”

Oh, my.  Our kingdom for an ice cube.  Right now.

And there it is, sort of, simply. We’re wrapped up in pillowcases. I am so bloody hot, so sticky and sweaty and greasy and tired, and so, so disempowered as a citizen. I’ve never been particularly political. I vote.  Left. I give small donations to what I believe are good peeps, good organizations. But finally, sitting here in this miserable damp heat, I have come to believe that our current federal government has failed us to the nth degree, and they have done it—snuck it all in, really—in the most minute measures of grasses, of slivers of moons, of more offshore drilling witnessed by next to none. New Orleans, and in turn Baton Rouge and far beyond, is in dire straights. Joseph’s and my converted corner grocery store home holds more memories for our neighborhood than it can count, but there’s no gravy, no lagniappe at the end of this day here, ya heard. 

We stare down the tunnel of the rest of our globally warming future. We are inches away from The Handmaid’s Tale, what with a rumored Creationist VP candidate, a woman whose own teenage children are denied birth control and who in turn become pregnant instead, a woman petitioning to take polar bears off the endangered species list, a woman who represents a possible future that will refuse to bolster Louisiana wetlands in the name of free enterprise. 

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