The latest news from the recent flooding in twenty of Louisiana's sixty-four parishes, caused by record rains, reports 40,000 homes damaged or destroyed and thirteen people dead. Authorities refer to it as the worst natural disaster to hit the country since superstorm Sandy.
Louisiana: at three syllables or four, your name caresses my ear like a poem. In my own accent, I stretch you out as long as I can and sing you all the way to five. Louisiana: my beautiful country on the Gulf of Mexico. Wherever I go in the world, you cling to me like a second skin, you with all of your heat and humidity and generosity.
Today—much as yesterday and tomorrow—I think of you, Louisiana. In this installment of Sacred Trespasses, all I can offer are these words and a few photographs. While you look at them, I invite you to listen to Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” an unofficial Louisiana anthem that always breaks my heart in the best of ways.
And I also invite you to visit the following websites to see what you can do to help those affected by these historic floods in parts of the state that have never been threatened by a deluge of water. For that reason, many of the people now displaced and homeless have no flood insurance. These are the people who opened their homes, their hearts, their cities to victims of Katrina. They need our help now.
—Kevin Rabalais
