NEW ORLEANS, LA. tonight, the photographer sat at the fold out table telling me of losing his home. he was in arizona at the time, but a friend grabbed some of the files and negatives in the photographer’s house before the flood waters rose. he lost everything else, but mostly he lost his home. the place means more than the material things. i felt that he didn’t want to be back here, in a place where all things–tangible and intangible–had been washed away. he sat in silence for a few moments looking off into nowhere, tears welling.

this morning, i drove to slidell to find a plumbing supply store. a clerk at ace hardware in st. benards told me slidell didn’t get hit by the flood so everything is open for business. thirty miles across the lake, i found slidell hardware, a small independent store with it’s double doors wide open. inside, a lanky old man with a bushy white beard was sitting comfortably on a bench. he popped his thumb out and told me to go to the back. the store smelled musty. a man, probably in his late fifties, was in the back using a wet/dry vacuum to suck up standing water on the floor. i told him how the clerk at ace hardware had told me slidell didn’t get hit. “ha! five feet of water stood inside this store.” there were a few new-looking items like batteries and flashlights, but everything else looked flooded. i bought some gaskets for my plumbing job at st. mary’s and conversed with the business owner, asking how long he’s been open since the storm. “i haven’t been open, i just come to clean up the mess and people come by. it’s over; i’m retiring. there’s nothing more for me here. there’s nothing else left for me to do but retire.” i could sense he had once been overwhelmed by sadness thinking about closing the hardware store. now, though, he had been through these thoughts so many times and you could only see his sadness deep in his eyes. he held himself up proudly. “forty years i’ve been opening up this store. forty years.” he grabbed a broom and swept the floor a bit. “i can’t do anything about it anymore… no flood insurance means no insurance. the forty years is over.” i told him it must have been a good forty years at least. he nodded his head, and turned to return to work.