The Big Easy comes to Dallas

So yesterday my friend M sends out an email asking for help because he has adopted two sisters 47 and 38 with her 10 year old daughter and put them up in an apartment.

They have been in the Superdome for 6 days and Dallas' Reunion Center for 5. With the 25,000 originally bused into Reunion, only 1,000 have not been placed in someone's home or in an apartment. Those left feel many levels of abandonment and trauma. Why has everyone else found a place to go? M has provided an apartment for them in Oak Cliff, but has run out of funds and they need furniture and "things to make an empty apartment in a new town feel like home".

My soul has been waiting for this email ever since CNN began showing images of chaos and throngs shouting at the cameras, "Help, help, help, help - We're dying out here."

Where is the soul of the home? Why every woman knows the answer to this... The kitchen of course. I can't wait to make my twice weekly pilgrimage to Mecca (Sam's Club) that is so conveniently on my way home and ring up some of those non-stick pots and perhaps a set of Tupperware to get the hearth started in the home.

Once home, as I pass through into the kitchen for a well deserved glass of water, my heart takes a jump as I pass by the watercolor of a Lousianna Bayou on my Dining Room wall. It stops me dead in my tracks and I am consumed with longing and grief. For the place that I have gone to since College for so many spring "Breaks" as refuge from the stoms of my life, where the people have opened their arms to me with a Blue note of soul soothing trumpet or a "Hey Darlin" or a "You gettin thawed out yet?" Those people are hurting now and the achingly beautiful pink bayous of their land have turned against them. It is time for me and our country to turn to our most hospitable people and open our arms with "Hey Darlin." The picture on the wall comes down and is added to the Hearth Pile. What has come from New Orleans must be returned back to it.