Shredded. That was the first impression from Laurel Street when I drove up to the house Friday after Isaac had spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday there. Tree and foliage that had once offered deep shade could only provide partial shade, so shredded were their leaves after the wind had whipped them for hours.

Occasionally there were glimpses of real damage from the hurricane, but that first impression was the neighborhood overview appeared brighter, starker, more exposed to the sun.

The last time I had spoken with Rosemary by phone had been Tuesday night as Isaac roared in. She had been lamenting that she had accidentally let Sissy outside and could not get her back in.

Sissy is the only feral damncat who has allowed herself to become mostly tamed after neutering. Mostly, but she’s got a mind of her own and decided to hunker down for the storm in the spot of her choosing instead of inside the house with Rosemary.

 Later, she would admit that she stayed outside as the storm grew, calling Sissy.

As I drove through the city, people were sitting on porches with doors and windows open. The discomfort from homes lacking electricity to power air conditioning was somewhat tempered by an enhanced sense of neighborhood comraderie.

We were lucky at our house. We had gas-heated water and a gas-fired stove top.

Our power came back on at 7 p.m. Saturday night. We immediately closed the windows and started the washing machine.

Elsewhere around the city, some sweltered longer, and irritation at Entergy New Orleans mounted.

As the storm had approached, the electric company had assured its customers about how many workers they had standing by to help with repairs once the storm had cleared.

Trouble was, they had difficulty coordinating all the extra help.

Convoys of bucket trucks from contract tree-trimmers would arrive in neighborhoods only to sit and wait for Entergy crews to de-energize a tangle of potentially hazardous lines. Or vice versa.

Then, the electric company in New Orleans is always damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. When the weather is good and they trim limbs away from power lines too aggressively, people get mad because they’ve sheared away the beauty.

But if they leave the limbs to blow down on power lines, people get mad because it takes them so long to get the limbs untangled and cut away so that power can be restored.

CN’s tracks around Lake Pontchartrain and between LaPlace and New Orleans were heavily damaged. As I approached the city on I-10 last Friday, portions of tracks were still submerged.

In other places that were above the water level, cross ties and supporting beams had been washed away.

Amtrak’s City of New Orleans has been running only between Memphis and Chicago since then. Service to New Orleans is expected to be restored Monday, September 10, according to its web site.

The waters generated by Isaac proved to be a good test for improvements made since Katrina to the hurricane protection system around New Orleans. The levees, gates and canals mostly worked as they were supposed to, keeping water out of the city.

However, people living outside the levee system now wonder if those improvements did not force more water on them, people in Slidell and in St. John Parish (west of New Orleans) especially now point their accusing fingers toward the city.

Estimates are that over 13,000 homes in areas surrounding New Orleans were flooded by Isaac. Seeing people coping with the mess left from flood waters quickly puts irritability over power loss into perspective.

Meanwhile, our wonderland of a neighborhood grocery store cashed in. Before the storm people stripped the shelves, buying anything imaginable for consumption as “hurricane food.”

The liquor shelves were stripped bare first.

Then, with power out, buyers flocked in to snatch up bags of ice being unloaded from large pallets that kept arriving on trucks. They also bought charcoal and anything that could remotely be considered grillworthy. Especially more liquor.

And when power was again restored, buyers flocked back into the store to replenish empty refrigerators freezers.

And to buy more liquor.

And that’s the way things are on Laurel Street in Uptown New Orleans, where the neighbors and the hoods blended together nicely during Hurricane Isaac’s aftermath and where someone is bound to have a sore head.