A Birthday, an Anniversary

Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Ida. 

Yesterday was my 37th birthday. 

The juxtaposition of these two dates don’t live easily in my body. Celebration and mourning. The singular gift of my life and the loss of at least 1,800 lives, countless structures, cultural erasure, and forced migration for so many. The contrast sits heavy, a mix of depression, avoidance, and fear, along with an urgency to make meaning. 

Twenty years ago I was a 17-year-old high school senior in Santa Fe, New Mexico. An eighth grader from New Orleans moved to our school and joined my soccer team. She had long brown hair and even longer legs and ran incredibly fast. I did not know to ask her about her experience, or how she felt being in the desert, so far away from home. 

I moved to New Orleans in 2012, one of many post-Katrina transplants in those early years after the storm. I searched out organizers and artists who were interested in talking with me, and asked a lot of questions about Katrina, philanthropy, grief, and power. I wanted to understand the ways in which philanthropy (the field I was entering into) had fucked up, and dream into different ways that resources could move. I think about the generosity and trust that people gave to me, which I certainly did not earn, and think especially of the many Black feminist thinkers who took me under their wings and pushed my thinking and organizing. These conversations shaped the way I think about resource mobilization, and the centering of Black feminist praxis, arts, culture, and spirit in my work. 

Although I knew I would never truly understand the way Katrina impacted New Orleans or the people I was in relationship with, I thought that I had a sense of the scale, the trauma, the utter change in the landscape of the city. 

It was not until Hurricane Ida that I realized just how little I knew about Katrina, and how I would never fully understand the impacts. 

Four years ago, on my 33rd birthday, we packed up our house in New Orleans, not knowing how long we were gonna be gone. While Hurricane Ida circled in the Gulf, gaining strength, my husband Bruno and I boarded up the windows to our house that faced an empty lot, open to the sky and trees, like bullseyes. We took apart the extra fencing we had laying the grass. Bruno hammered out the slats from the 2 x 4 crossbars, handed them to me, then I hammered out the stray nails, then I measured and marked the boards to fit our windows exactly: 36 inches. Then I brought them to Bruno, who cut the pieces with his circular saw on makeshift saw horses set up on a patch of grass. We opened our ten foot ladder in front of each window, each holding a screwdriver, and traveled up on either side of the ladder, one piece of wood at a time.

Align. Drill. Next piece. One step higher. Align. Drill. Next piece. One step higher. 

And on and on. Never mind my fear of heights, or my fear of disaster. 

We drove on 90 west to avoid the interstate and moved slow and heavy like the August heat. I kept receiving text messages from friends and family across the country wishing me a happy birthday, some of them texting back hours later to ask me if I was okay as the storm reached national attention. 

The gas stations that we passed in Louisiana had hand painted cardboard signs reading “NO GAS”. When we crossed into Texas, we stopped at a small service station with a bathroom full of trash, with a door that didn’t lock. While Bruno used the bathroom, I wandered blindly through the aisles looking for a snack. I settled on pistachios and potato chips. As I checked out, I was the only customer in the station. A middle aged man was working the cash register behind a tall pane of plexiglass. He locked eyes with me and I could not avoid his gaze. 

He asked, “How are you?”

I think I laughed, or smiled, or perhaps my jaw dropped. I didn’t look away. 

I said, “Well, I’m actually in the middle of evacuating Hurricane Ida. And today is my birthday”. There was a long pause. 

He smiled. He took another breath and held my attention. In this moment, the chaos of the day slowed down, my breath matching his. I felt genuinely seen, and strangely happy. Here I was, inside of something I deeply feared and worked to avoid: feeling how much I did not know about the future, and feeling my fears and my joy simultaneously. 

“Happy birthday”, he said. I smiled, said thank you, bought my nuts and chips, and headed back to the car to continue our drive west. 

This is the part that has been hardest to put into words: My birthday four years ago was one of the best birthdays of my life. I felt deeply connected to being born and the vulnerability that comes in living. On the day of my birth, I did not know what was coming the next day, just as on that day 33 years later, I did not know what the next day would bring. We were lucky: it was not a devastating storm for New Orleans (although other parts down South were badly hit), and we did not sustain major damage to our house.

Despite this, I asked myself to let the experience change me. To really let it in. To move with uncertainty rather than avoid it. To trust life, and to learn the lessons that are given to me. To look more squarely at the reality of climate collapse and my role in the destruction and my role in the repair.

I was humbled by how much I felt impacted by Ida, and how much less destruction it had caused as compared to Katina 16 years earlier. I believe we cannot fully understand something we do not experience, but we can continue to stay open to learning, listening, being present—and through this, allow ourselves to be impacted and be moved towards action. I am still learning from New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and the way people transmute trauma into organizing, connection, and collective power. Colette Pichon Battle has reminded me–remembering Katrina, no matter who or where you are, matters. Our memories, our intention, and our lives matter for those living and those past. 

August 28th and 29th will always live right next to one another. The questions remain: What will I do with this tension? How do I hold life and death simultaneously? How do I hold what is my own while keeping the whole in mind? 

We each have a piece to do to bring more care, creativity, justice, and attention, to build a culture and movement of repair. May we feel our vulnerability, and let that move us toward one another. 

I hope you take care of yourself. 

Further Reading, Listening, and Viewing 

Taproot Earth K20 Days of Action

Interview with Colette Pichon Battle on the Right to Return 

Katrina Stories Podcast by Mondo Bizarro 

Southern Cultures, Katrina’s America, Fall 2025 Issue

Displacing Blackness by Shana M. griffin