Sherry Chandler

Here is a blog, Operation Eden, that I discovered through BagNews. The blogger’s bio states:

clayton james cubitt’s mom was a teenage runaway, go-go dancing at a club on bourbon street in new orleans. his dad was a canadian national running pot over the border from mexico. they met, married, and moved to los angeles, conceiving him on the trip in the back of a vw bus at dinosaur national park in utah. now he takes pictures and lives in brooklyn. he grew up in new orleans and the gulf coast, where his family still lives.

The Bag adds a few details:

Clayton, known professionally as Siege, had finally scraped together enough money last March to move his mother out of a shack she had been sharing with nine people and into her own trailer between Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and Slidell, Louisiana. In a cruel twist of fate, however, the hurricane left his mother and his younger brother homeless and destitute

I found this site a little too late for Thanksgiving Day proper but perhaps not too late on this holiday weekend to ask you to spend some time reading there and looking at the photographs, some time sending thoughts out to those ordinary people struggling here in our country and all around the world. This is, perhaps, the true power of blogging, that you can see these events on the ground, close and personal, and considerably less media filtered.

Here is an excerpt from cubitt’s Thanksgiving Day post:

And I should be in the Gulf right now, with my mom and little brother, using the Thanksgiving break to dig through the months-dried mud, sifitng for scraps to salvage and be thankful for. My mom’s really hoping she’ll be able to save her old vinyl collection, now that it’s not so swampy in her trailer, and maybe the mold’s not quite so aggressive. And she thinks she could get a FEMA travel trailer now, and the government will bulldoze her Eden and haul it away, for free even. But then she feels sad, she knows she’s better off staying settled for now in North Carolina with the wonderful people who’ve helped so much there. And even more she knows that my little brother is better off up there, and feels doubly guilty again. Guilty for one that she’s not surviving, barnacle steadfast, Cajun stubborn, alongside the others in the muck and speculation and slow grinding dread in the Gulf. And then again she feels guilty for feeling that guilt, the guilt of the exile, that she should be thankful for the oasis she’s found herself in, and she is thankful, so thankful, but also guilty for it.

He will kill mice, and he will be kind to babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

— Rudyard Kipling, from “The Cat that Walked By Himself”