A city that awakened her senses

THERE WAS ALWAYS NEW Orleans.

I would grow tired of wherever I was living, move on, get restless again and remember New Orleans. Always it was there, hovering, no matter where I went or what I was doing.

New Orleans was the place I returned to over and over in my mind, the place I never quit imagining would be my final stop.

Is it time yet, I would ask myself? Time, at last, to go home?

I was born in Louisiana and spent my adolescence in a moody backwoods Cajun town on a bayou not far up the highway from New Orleans. The Big Easy was a quick zip away, but it was also a world apart -- an exotic, multicultural, textured metropolis that wrapped its sensuality around you and left it there for good.

Visually, New Orleans educated you, its faded elegance exuding a reverence for the nuanced beauty of ruin and decay. The semitropical climate demanded that kind of sophistication. Paint peeling from walls: how wonderful. Keep it that way.

You got to know architecture intimately, all manner of it: Greek Revival, Neoclassical, Craftsman, Victorian, French Colonial, Spanish Colonial, most of it embowered by luxuriant vegetation. You learned what louvered jalousies and pedimented dormers were, and you learned that a cast-iron gallery was a kind of porch. You came to love the sound of street names -- Chartres, Calliope, Euterpe.

Just saying the name New Orleans, I am enfolded by the memories of its smells, as if the room in which I sit is saturated with them -- roasting coffee, magnolias, bourbon and stale tobacco, the Bourbon Street sidewalks in the thick heat.

New Orleans shaped you in a way no other place in the South could. It was soft and languid and sultry and dreamy, and it tolerated everything and everybody. It was both Southern and not Southern, familiar and foreign.

For years, until I left Louisiana at 22, I went to New Orleans every chance I got, to Mardi Gras, to the Jazz and Heritage Festival, to wedding receptions in opulent high-ceilinged mansions and parties in tiny Creole cottages, to lunches and dinners at Antoine’s, Brennan’s, Galatoire’s, Court of Two Sisters.

Nine days after the great wrath of Hurricane Katrina and the greater horror of the bursting levee, I still can’t absorb the full impact of our monumental loss. At first, I was oddly removed, especially following it from the helpless distance of L.A. Just a movie. Not real, not happening, not true. Not all those people, gone. Not all those homes, gone. Not all those historic buildings gone. Impossible. There’s been some mistake.

Why hadn’t I called my family before it struck? I hadn’t taken it seriously enough: Hurricanes were a fact of life in southern Louisiana. I had even recklessly waited for one on the grassy slope of a levee near a grand plantation when I was in my late teens, thrilled by the deepening sky and the sudden ominous stillness that signaled it was the moment to run for cover.

But I wasn’t prepared for this one. I doubt anyone really was.

“Remember Camellia Grill?” my younger sister asked me by phone from the East Coast a couple of days ago. “I keep thinking of all those dignified old cooks and waiters who had worked there for decades, and I wonder: Did they get out alive? The poorest of the poor got stuck, and I can’t get it off my mind.”

My other three sisters live in Baton Rouge, where power lines went down and stayed down for what seemed an eternity. I dialed, redialed, watched the news, felt numb. There’s been some mistake.

Two nephews live in Biloxi, Miss., and -- like thousands of other people left in limbo as they agonized over the fate of family and friends -- I had no way of knowing how they were. Finally I reached my older sister: Everyone was safe. Two other sisters lost their vacation houses in Gulfport, Miss., she told me, but they count it as meaningless compared with what they’re witnessing firsthand as busloads of homeless New Orleanians pour into Baton Rouge.

Each day now she works at a shelter serving meals, bathing the disabled. Her twin, a nurse, is pulling 24 hour shifts in a clinic she runs ministering to the sick and injured. My nieces are sorting donations for the Red Cross.

She kept mentioning all the stories of the evacuees she’d met, so many stories: “There’s a story behind every person and every family.... They have nothing left, no place to go after this.

“Can’t you come down and tell their stories for them?” she asked. “Can’t you come home?”

I can go back to Louisiana for a while, yes. I can help out, as they’re helping out, despite the overwhelm of sadness they all say they’re feeling. My own numbness is taking on the awful tingle of real grief. New Orleans, my New Orleans, is no more. I can go back, but I can’t go home.

Barbara King can be reached at home@latimes.com.