A month after Hurricane Katrina,I returned home in New Orleans.There lay my house,reduced to waist-high ruins,smelly and dirty.Before the trip,I''d had my car fixed.When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill,she noticed my Louisiana license plate.“You are from New Orleans?”she asked.I said I was.“No charge,”she said,and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet.The next day I went for a haircut,and the same thing happened.As my wife was studying in Florida,we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage(按揭贷款)on our ruined house.We looked at many places,but none was satisfactory.We''d begun to accept that we''d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while,when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California.He''d read some pieces I''d written about our sufferings for Slate,the online magazine,and wanted to give us(“no conditions attached”)a new house across the lake from New Orleans.
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