First visit to the apartment

I finally got to see our place. My husband and I have an apartment in Uptown on Camp Street, between Robert and Upperline. Right after Katrina hit I started seeing posts in the nola.com forums about a fire that swept through the Camp/Upperline area, and burned 5 houses down to the cinders. I knew - I just knew our house was one of them. I just knew something more awful had to happen to us. When it rains, it pours, right? Surviving the hurricane with no flooding, only to have our wonderful apartment be burned to ash.

But our place didn't burn down. It was intact, with roof and window damage that's fixable. Went we went inside, the power was back on so the fridge didn't smell like hell (though we have to get rid of it) and the only overwhelming smell was that of the mold and mildew that was cloaking several walls. The minor damage our apartment suffered almost made me feel guilty.

Our neighbors' houses-turned-ashes is a sickening thing to see. It looks like a bomb exploded. Just the chimneys, the porch steps and the porch pillars remain. The cars on the street near those houses were burned down to the unpainted metal. The paint on the license plates was burned off, and the plates themselves warped under the heat. After a few hours of getting sweaty, headachey from the mold and crabby from the heat while loading our possessions into boxes, I looked out to see that awful devastation and I just felt numb.