ten years ago. We were sitting outside in The Shack, a.k.a. The Synaptic Jct., at the Compound– our home in Cincinnati– with the usual Sunday Supper Crew.

Mr. Big Food and I had been tracking the storm. It had been upgraded to a Cat 5 with winds of 175mph. Having lived in hurricane country, and having seen what S&*^-Fu#@ed-Up (thanks, Floyd) looks like, we appreciated the bigness of Katrina in a way I don’t think the Crew did.

Of course there was nothing we could do at the time but watch The Weather Channel. (Remember the way the television was rigged up out on the bar in The Shack?)

We did not have the fixin’s for Hurricanes. And so I called Billy at Northside Tavern and asked if she knew how to make them. She did not– Hurricanes were not popular in Cincinnati. That changed in 2008 (thanks, Ike) but in 2005 Billy didn’t know how to make a Hurricane. So Mr. Big Food looked up the recipe; I asked her if she had the ingredients– she did– and we all trundled down to Northside Tavern to drink Hurricanes and watch The Weather Channel.

We lived in FEMA trailers and tore down our homes. The most striking picture of what we lost was when the claw truck came down our street and in a matter of minutes, the huge pile of debris and personal items – furniture, my baby daughter’s clothes and toys, pictures, memories – everything we had worked for and invested in was scooped up and dropped in the back of a garbage truck.

I’ve been busy this week. I haven’t kept up with the World Wide Web’s remembrance of Katrina. I did come across this catastrophe advise via Instapundit.com:

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, one victim was political scientist Daniel Aldrich. He had just moved to New Orleans. Late one August night, there was a knock on the door.

“It was a neighbor who knew that we had no idea of the realities of the Gulf Coast life,” said Aldrich, who is now a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. He “knocked on our door very late at night, around midnight on Saturday night, and said, ‘Look, you’ve got small kids — you should really leave.’ “

…

 “Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and the people who will help you,” he added, “they’re usually neighbors.”

…

Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors.

Two Three words, folks: Saturday/Sunday Supper.