One of the lucky ones
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By Doug Snover
Antigone
Pierson counts herself as one of the lucky ones.
She is living in Scottsdale in a three-bedroom house with her son,
Taylor, and ten other people forced out of their homes in the New Orleans
area by Hurricane Katrina.
Some
1,500 miles away, her house in Lacombe, Louisiana, is still standing,
although Antigone has been told there is neither electricity nor running
water. Her local sheriff’s department advised her not to come home soon.
Covington
is north of Lake Pontchartrain and New Orleans. Antigone, 29, is one of
the lucky ones. Her nearly new house is still standing. There will be
something to go home to … someday.
Taylor’s
father, Taylor Tebbe, who lives in New Orleans, was flooded out.
“He
stayed for the whole storm in New Orleans. He was on the second floor of
the house with one to two feet of water on the second floor. The single
story houses were all underwater,” she said.
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Most
of Taylor Tebbe’s family also lost their homes in the flood. Antigone pauses
to count them – Taylor; his mother and father; his grandfather, an uncle who
has a wife and three kids; an aunt with a husband the two children; and two
aunts who are single. All flooded out by Katrina.
But
all safe, according to reports Antigone has heard from the devastated area.
“I
feel lucky. I know that all my family is accounted for. My family and all my
friends are accounted for,” she said.
Antigone
is a paralegal, but her law firm in Louisiana is shut down temporarily.
“As
soon as they can get things up and running, they want me to come back,” she
said.
Meanwhile,
she is working temporarily as a receptionist in the Mary Contreras’ State Farm
Agency in the Kyrene Corridor. And her son, Taylor, started attending elementary
school in Scottsdale this week.
Not
that things are ‘back to normal’ by any means.
Normal
was the way things were just before the hurricane. Taylor has just started in a
new, private boys school, and was trying out for the football team. The school
participated in a football jamboree on Saturday.
The
next morning, Antigone packed what she could in her car and drove west. It took
15 hours to reach Houston on highways clogged with people evacuating the New
Orleans area.
“We
were only planning to go to Houston for a couple of days and then go home,”
she said.
Instead,
they came to Arizona when the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was revealed. She
and Taylor, as well as her mother and father, are staying with Leslie Lally in
Lally’s Scottsdale home. Lally’s own mother and several other relatives also
are staying in the house, refugees from Louisiana.
“I’m
happy to have someone to take me in,” Antigone said. “Everybody is trying to
pick up the pieces.”
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