"Daddy told the deputy that Sunday night, 'Don't come again because we're going to sleep,'" Martin says. Nor would he listen to the sheriff's department's urgent requests.
Thirty-six hours before the storm hit, Martin returned to the homestead to beg once more. Before Katrina, they'd fled 25 times - one year, they left three times.īut when Katrina threatened, Martin's parents, 82-year-old Rosalie and Pivon Dupuy, refused their daughter's pleas to leave. Her family lost everything that year.įor Peggy and M.J., who married in 1969, evacuating hurricanes had become an almost annual ritual. Back in 1965, as a teenager in Arabi (a suburb of New Orleans), she'd stepped from bed into water brought by Hurricane Betsy and heard the baying distress of the family's beagles.
"We called it God's country."Īs Katrina boiled in the Gulf in August 2005, Martin was consumed with a familiar fear. "It smelled like heaven," the New Orleans native says quietly. It reminds Martin of the fragrance of the hundreds of roses, jasmine and other flowers that once bloomed here. Why the rose lived when so much else died, Martin has no idea.īut it has become a fitting symbol of revival, another chapter in the story of an old bloomer whose name and origins remain a mystery.Ī gentle spring breeze picks up its slight, musky scent. Martin's former brick home reads, "Don't Touch." A half-buried shoe lies by the slab of her parents' house, which stood nearby for 54 years. In stark contrast to the cheerful petals, a hand-painted sign posted on the gloomy shell of Peggy and M.J. It's easy to spot from the road that snakes past the homestead and follows the Mississippi River south to the Gulf of Mexico. Today, the resilient old rose again blankets the shed in pink. New life already was sprouting along the arching canes that once had hidden the tractor shed in an explosion of bright-pink blooms. Her garden, once a paradise with 450 old roses, one of the most important collections in the South, was drowned in 20 feet of water.īut amid this gray destruction, when the waters drained, Martin found a survivor - a nameless old rose.
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