I still feel a little guilty when someone asks about our losses from Katrina. We had a house in New Orleans that didn’t get flooded but got a new roof afterward. We evacuated to my mother’s home in Batesville — Annie-Glenn’s Bed and Breakfast, my part-time abode then and now. Once Mother’s house overflowed when my sister’s family from Hattiesburg joined us, Richard and Leigh Ann Darby loaned us for several months their then-vacant but furnished and lovely home on East Lee Street in Sardis.

Last weekend began the extensive television coverage of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Images collected from personal videos and other sources were compiled to create a moving chronicle of nature’s power and the human and animal suffering that followed.

I awoke in Batesville early on Saturday, August 27, 2005. I came to the office to check the status of Hurricane Katrina on the Internet. The storm had formed as a tropical depression near the Bahamas only four days before and then turned into Katrina before clipping the southern tip of Florida on Wednesday. Once it hit the warm Gulf waters, it grew from category 3 to category 5 in less than nine hours.

Still, on Thursday and Friday I waited for the turn. After all, in 2004 Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne had all turned away from New Orleans and struck Florida instead. Someone said later that the way New Orleans prepared for hurricanes was to wish it would go someplace else.

But early that Saturday morning, Katrina didn’t look like it was going to make the turn.

I headed south, picking up canned food, bottled water and other recommended supplies along the way. I refueled before I drove into the city.

When I pulled up to our house on Laurel Street at mid-afternoon that Saturday, I had a hard time finding a place to park near our house. Across the street New Orleans Recreation Department (NORD) was holding a peewee football jamboree. In the stifling pre-hurricane heat and humidity, little fellows suited with pads and helmets joisted about to the boisterous cheers of adults whose minds could not have been further from worry about an approaching hurricane.

Twenty-four hours later — on Sunday afternoon — we joined an endless line of vehicles crawling out of the city. And no one among those motorists or their passengers thought we were leaving for any more than a few days.

By the time we reached Manchac, squalls were rocking our car.

We reached Batesville around midnight, exhausted.

The next few days are still a blur. On Monday morning we awoke to the news that New Orleans had received a glancing blow and that the Mississippi coast had taken the full fury. Later that day or early the next, we heard about the levees and watched on CNN as water poured through breaks in canal levees and rose higher and higher until it finally topped off at sea level.

Not until my wife saw CNN video shot on unflooded Tchoupitoulas Street near our home did we became convinced that it had escaped the flooding.

On Wednesday, September 7 we undertook what became an epic rescue mission to the beleaguered city. It involved damncats, of course, and a neighbor lady who refused to evacuate without her two dogs.

Our nephew accompanied us. He had already determined that his home located nearer the city center had flooded. He hoped to reach it to release caged pets and otherwise cut his losses.

That trip is now also a blur. We encountered police who refused to let us in and then National Guard troops who directed us to the other side of the Mississippi River from where we were able to enter across the Cresent City Connection. We followed Tchoupitoulas Street to our home.

Then our nephew and I drove toward his home, finding on the other side of St. Charles Avenue eerily silent waters

that gradually deepened as we moved toward city’s center and soon forced us to give up the attempt. (Another neighbor later reached the caged rabbits and released them. They yet survive.)

There were convoys of troops, police from across the country at intersections and a strange silence so uncharacteristic of that city.

We left late that day with three damncats, two dogs, Miss Gloria and ourselves.

My wife reclaimed our house to stay there in early October and watched Uptown rapidly come back to life.

Since then there have been grand plans to establish green zones in the lowest areas of the city.

Other schemes have been forwarded that if adopted might have been the logical choice to address New Orleans’ many urban ills. Few if any have been adopted. Logical choices are seldom a factor there, and that’s what has always made the city so unique and alluring.

“New Orleans is not a city of reasonable people — not within the usual definition,” I wrote on these pages following that epic, post-Katrina visit. “That’s why relocating them en masse to other cities won’t work.

“Eventually, most of them are going to get so homesick for that place, they will start trickling south, return trips triggered when they hear Fats Domino’s ‘Walking to New Orleans’ or some other such Crescent City signature selection played one too many times.

“Ultimately, that’s why New Orleans will have to be rebuilt. The country can’t survive without an island to put all those unreasonable people on.”

And that’s how the rebuilding in the most flooded areas has progressed — unreasonably and higgly-piggly, with a few restored homes on this block, a few on the next and many vacant homes or lots between.

In a few years, barring another flood, it will be so typically New Orleans that it will add to the allure.

But I still feel a little guilty when someone asks how I fared during the hurricane. I think about those people in low-lying areas and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who lost so much.

And I still wonder about what happened to all of those football players and fans who were playing in Wisner Playground that Saturday afternoon.