The New Yorker:

Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, I’ve left the city that raised me.

By Jeanie Riess

Most of us feel raised by the places where we were born, but, at the risk of offending people born in every other place, I believe that people from New Orleans feel an especially filial connection to their city: born of its heat and nurtured by its oils.

I do not know whether I feel this way because of Hurricane Katrina or in spite of it. Perhaps I would feel this way regardless of whether or not the entire city had almost ceased to exist twenty years ago. But I have lost a mother, and I have almost lost a city, and I can tell you that the feeling of one is similar to the other. Neither a mother nor a city is perfect, and both are easy to hate. Until, that is, they are dying. Then it is impossible not to love them.

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