I mowed lawns three days a week for a decade, desperately hoping the teenage girls of Ohio would cruise by, see the young man pushing the machine with his shirt off. When you're mowing all day at the entrance to the neighborhood, you know they have to drive by sometime. It was a strange, underpants-gnome kind of theory.Point being, I have mowed some grass in my time. I've mowed into oncoming traffic, mowed for $15 a lawn, mowed for charity. I mowed a rabbit once, threw up, then kept on mowing. I tried to mow up a hill once that was so steep that the whole machine tipped over and came clattering after me as I ran terrified from it.
Yet, until the Times posted this slideshow of New Orleans folks making do, I did not know you could mow heroically. (You have the two minutes to listen.)
It comes down to mowing and setting up a mail box:
Maps of mail deliveries, prepared by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, a local nonprofit group, show the strength of the revival. Last August, for instance, an insignificant number of households in the flooded areas were receiving mail. A map compiled this spring showed that postal customers per square mile in those neighborhoods had multiplied into the low thousands. If the overall population has also increased to about 62 percent of the pre-Katrina count — from 49.5 percent last July, as postal deliveries have — that means the city’s current population may be up to 250,000 to 260,000.With extremely minimal help from anyone else.
It is a long way from the prestorm population of 450,000, but the effect of the new residents is clear in block after block.
