We survived "Rita"!. We are back in Houston in one piece. Our home is full of branches, but that is all. Margaret Nunez is also back. Georgina Torres and Margaret Yong are OK and Lydia Allen saved us from sleeping on a parking lot in Austin. We did spend the first night at "La Quinta", my son in the truck and my mother and I in the lobby (2 hours) but after that we found Lydia's daughter's home in Spicewood and they put us up for 2 nights. What a blessing to encounter such charitable people! They treated us like family. Lydia's daughter and son in law are Baptist and their Church had a shelter for 84 people so not only did they open her home to us but they spent a lot of time going to the Church helping out serving, cooking, and welcoming the Houston-Galveston refugees or "fugitives" like I like to call us.

We are back home. We just heard the airlines are trying to bring back the people that left and they are having a hard time accommodating the flights already in schedule so God will let us know how and when we get to Missouri this weekend. He is always in charge. Thank you for your prayers and for your concern for the Carmelite Family! Love from Houston, [Margarita Dufilho ocds]

"The Big Easy". The people of New Orleans never called their city that. Nothing was particularly easy in New Orleans, with its tropical heat, poverty, endemic public corruption, appalling murder rate and racial divides. It was a city sustained more by spirit than corporeal commodities; by determination to enjoy life in spite of adversity. The real slogan for New Orleans was Laissez les bons temps rouler – let the good times roll. And the official nickname was "The Crescent City" for the way the Mississippi River curls around New Orleans like a scimitar. It was so disorienting to wake up in the morning and see the sun rising over the "west" side of the river that New Orleanians did not use normal directional guides. Instead, south, north, east and west were called respectively: uptown, downtown, riverside and lakeside. New Orleans drew its strength from the water. Its commerce, its food, its music were all directly related to the water.

From the beginning, New Orleans harbored a water culture and a free-wheeling environment foreign to the rest of the South. There was a hypnotic appeal to the place... Over the years, New Orleans became home for tens of thousands of Mississippians escaping the stern dictates of the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. With its ‘round the clock bars and jazz halls and striptease artists, it was an El Dorado for those of us who suffered under Prohibition and Sunday blue laws imposed by Baptist leaders. New Orleans existed, to use another old slogan, as "the city that care forgot." It was a hedonistic empire, built along the water, long before Las Vegas was built on the sand.

Water was conducive to good times. Strangely enough, so was Roman Catholicism. The denomination ruled the city with a tolerance for drinking and dancing and song. The church also discourged racial discrimination. As a result, New Orleans had less racial conflict than other cities in the region.

Walter Percy, the philosophical novelist, Catholic convert and son of the Mississippi Delta, moved to New Orleans early in his life... Many Mississippians of Percy’s generation came to New Orleans bearing the mythology of the great flood of 1927, when the Misssisippi River breached the levee system and swept over dozens of towns and thousands of acres of cottom land in the Delta... Percy wrote of the city in an essay:

"One comes upon it," he wrote, "in the unlikeliest of places, by penetrating the depths of the Bible Belt, running the gantlet of Klan territory, the pine barrens of south Mississippi, Bogalusa, and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before." ["Three Watery giants & a seafaring city" by Curtis Wilkie of the San Jose Mercury News]