This is Tessie

This is Tessie. I am not related to her, but I would call her my sister to anyone who asked. While she is, quite obviously, adorable and winning, that is not my reason for posting her here. (Or at least not my only reason.)

For the first few months of crying and sifting through the rubble, we all lived in Mike and Linda's big house in Metairie: three married couples, two single women, and one Tessie. That does not count the guests who came in from out of town to help gut houses and slept on the air mattress in the tiny sewing room or on the sofa in the living room where we had to take the chimes off the grandfather clock so that they could sleep. It does not count the other three houses on the same block that we filled with refugees and volunteers. But I can't tell everyone's story here. And anyway, the smaller stories are the same as the one larger story in the end.

Mike and Linda's house was blessedly undamaged, aside from needing a new roof and new fence in the backyard. A three-story house built in the old New Orleans style with the kitchen on the second floor, it had been large enough to raise seven children in, and we found that it was now just adequate for nine people and a good portion of their recovered belongings.

Mike, at the same time as we were busy invading his home, found that he hardly had the opportunity to be there. His longtime employer had to make repairs to its New Orleans office, and Mike's job was now in Baton Rouge, Houston, and Robert, Louisiana all at the same time. Mike was never in the same place for more than two or three days at a time. Mike is a lawyer; a man who knows what he thinks; a man who runs things. He was done yelling at god by the time we began returning to the city. At home, his demeanor rarely changed. He gathered information, gave directions, conducted discussions, and generally made sure everything was running smoothly.
Tessie didn't say "Mike" until we were several weeks into this radical common living endevour, but when she finally did, she became the second person Mike spoke to when he walked in the door. We had tried to train Tessie to scream "No!" after anyone said, "Luke, I am your father. It is your destiny". Mike would get down on his knees and do his very best Darth Vader impression for all he was worth. He could never get Tessie to respond, but we all had a good time chuckling at him. And we desperately needed to chuckle.


Linda returned to the house in Metairie to make sure that the roof got fixed and take care of the rest of us. When we came in from mucking about in ruined houses all day, She always had a hearty, delicious meal waiting. Not only that, but she was continually asking what else she could do. She lent cars, gave rides, did all the shopping, delivered sandwiches to the work sites at lunch time, and in the middle of all this, went to Buffalo NY and gave an entire retreat by herself.
When Linda scoffs at something, she has a peculiar way of blowing air out of her mouth. Tessie quickly picked up on this, and before long, we were all asking Tessie to imitate Linda with the cue, "What does Linda say?" Linda frequently volunteered to baby-sit Tessie, although she never got much of a chance with the rest of us around vying for the baby's attention. She told Tessie all about her own granddaughters, and put on a very good show of not being annoyed when Tessie rearranged her kitchen.

Megan, Mike and Linda's daughter, and Dave, her husband, bought a house in Metairie and spent months working to fix it up. They had just moved out of Mike and Linda's when the storm flooded their new house and forced them to move back in. To further complicate the matter, neither of their jobs survived the storm entirely intact. Dave was let go from the chiropractic practice where he was working, and Megan began to hear rumors soon after she returned to work that the hospital where she worked was likely to let her go.
Megan, a speech therapist, practiced new words with Tessie whenever she had time and marveled at how quickly Tessie learned compared to Megan's patients. Dave glanced down from his big armchair in front of the television in the evenings after a long day of making roofing estimates part time, and made faces at Tessie when he thought no one was looking.

Liz and John, Tessie's parents, had only recently moved into a house in Metairie themselves, but unlike Megan and Dave, they were renting. John's job was secure, but for the first few months his office had nowhere to work, so he went to the house by himself every day to sort through sodden belongings while Liz stayed home with Tessie. He would come in sweaty leate every night to the plate of Linda's dinner we saved for him with news of some newly discovered casulty - the camera, the guitar, the high school yearbooks. There was a new defeat every day. He listened patiently to all of the new things we had taught Tessie to say and rolled his eyes until we realized that he felt left out. The happiest I saw John during those dark days was the day we taught Tessie to say, "I love you, Dad".
Aside from the flooded rental house, Liz's family lost four other houses to the storm, including the family home in Mississippi, which had stood on the beach for over one hundred years. She poured herself into taking care of Tessie during the days. Any down time was time to fret and worry and had to be avoided. She removed Tessie from the phone cord and electrical outlets over and over again and wished for the day she woud have her own porch back and could let Tessie go wild with finger paints.

Eileen, another of Mike and Linda's daughters, was kind enought to share her room with me. Eileen had become engaged only a month and a half before the storm, and wedding plans were already well underway when the storm hit. As a nurse, she stayed in the city during the storm, working at a hospital and watching the water rise in the river until she drew the lucky straw for a chance to leave with a patient. Eileen spent the few months after the storm trying to line up all of the normal details of a wedding in a city where nothing was open and wondering whether any of this really mattered compared to how much everyone else had lost. Eileen would come in from the mall or dress-fitting or the florist's and pick up Tessie and just hug her forever.

I suppose I must also mention myself. My university cancelled the semester, butI came back to the city anyway. I came back for the people in this house and for the rest of the People of Praise. My brothers and sisters needed me, and I had to be here. I helped gut half a dozen houses and became Tessie's best friend. It was the best thing I've ever done with a few months in my life, but not because of the fuzzy feeling you get when you do something for someone else. I've never lived so closely with any other group of people in my life. We were all raw and helpless at the same moment, and we all knew exactly what it felt like. We were one people without having to work for it. It just was.