On my last day as a resident of New Orleans...

I walked through my soon-to-be empty house. Everything was almost done...but things still felt incomplete.I was leaving the city against my wishes.

Mom was sick, dad's cancer was back...both were almost down for the count...so back to Boston I went.I was leaving the only place I've ever been where I honestly felt like I fit. Perfectly.My heart was heavy.

In my bedroom there was a very shallow yet very wide closet. It was only about 18 inches deep but extended to cover nearly an entire bedroom wall. A sort of vertical crawl space. I can only surmise that whoever designed it was a madman.

I opened the double doors...just to peek inside and make sure I wasn't leaving anything behind (I'd already looked...but don't you just always check and check again?). And I had an idea. I grabbed a red magic marker from my desk.Then I eased into the closet backwards...and shuffled and shimmied my way sideways down inside the wall.And what I had a few inches before my face was a very large canvas.

I began to write. And I wrote...and wrote and wrote. I reached as high as I could and scribbled line after line. Then I worked my way to the other side of the doors and continued on that fresh slate.I covered the walls with my pen.I wrote a long love letter to New Orleans.It contained a brief history of my time there. Little sketches of the people I knew, things I had done, why I loved the city, some of the aspects I hated (very few) and so much more that I can't remember now.

It was a secret letter.

Because no one could have casually seen what I wrote. One would have had to stick their head into the closet and twisted it around to see it. It would take a little work to see it and a lot of work to read it.It cracked me up to think that the next resident of my house would look at that closet and think "what kind of maniac designs a closet like this?" Then poke their head in to marvel at the impossible dimensions and stumble across my letter...and think "And what type of maniac worms inside and scribbles a secret manifesto inside such an impossible closet?!" Anyone with the tenacity to read it would be my kind of person.

That long letter was my little chronicle of important personal history. It was like a cave painting waiting to be discovered.

Then the levees broke.

The neighborhood where I lived took between eight and twelve feet of water. I watched the TV reports...and punched my coffee table every time a news chopper flew over my neighborhood. I read the online charts showing water depth. My house was submerged.After the waters receded...a friend still living there took photos and mailed them to me. The water line was way up there.High enough to submerge most of my letter. The toxic gumbo washed it all away. Well...maybe the uppermost lines survived. But it really doesn't matter. At last report...the house was an empty hulk.

I may challenge myself to recreate it.