Continued Katrina loss
I have to start out by saying I really love holiday lights. They’re one of those things that regardless of how I’m personally feeling about the whole mad commericialized holiday BS I still love seeing beautiful lights in the trees, on the houses, and at events, like the lights at the zoo here in Denver, or Festival of Lights, sadly not happening this year, in New Orleans City Park.
I actually read a few days ago that they are using a section of the park there for a dump. It made me cry. I always felt that City Park must have put Central Park to shame. Not that I’d ever been to the Big Apple, but City Park in New Orleans was big, beautiful, and in some places kind of wild and unknown. Trees from the time of the civil war existed there. There was a tree known as the “Dueling Oaks” because that was where young men came to duel and die. There was a part of the park, back behind a sports field that was rarely even visited, and all the grass had grown up around it, and blackberry brambles had totally taken a circle that surrounded a beautiful grove of trees. They had clearly been planted together and with purpose. They were a circle, and in that circle you could actually feel the magic and energy of the place. The blackberries that grew there were the biggest I’d ever seen, and I have found memories of that place. It was like a hidden spot in the middle of the city that was special.
There were what seemed to be ruins in other places. Stone buildings of some nature, with columns that had been open to the sky, that had partially fallen down, not nearly as old of course, as ruins anywhere else, but still beautiful. And it was a big park. I forget exactly how big, but it was the 2nd biggest in the country (if not the biggest) beaten only by Central Park. It had a miniture amusement park with a carousel that had horses that had been restored from some time long ago with hand painted eyes and tails. It had an entire themed nursery story land with a ship from Peter Pan, and whale that you could walk into. It had a huge botanical garden full of all kinds of flowers and plants that thrived in the south.
And all of it gone. All of it. Dead and dying. Hundreds of years old trees, beautiful live oaks, standing like skeletons over the brown dirt. And worst of all, this beautiful place that I loved, being used for a dump of all the refuse and garbage from all the destroyed homes and buildings. More than anything I’ve read, that makes me so sad.
