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By Associated PressSome New Orleans residents have moved back to the only functioning part of the house: the second floor.
NEW ORLEANS - Four and a half weeks after he swam out of his flooded house, pushing his parrot's cage on a floating tire, Joe Thompson decided he couldn't go another night away from home.
"That's it," he told himself. "I need to sleep in my own bed."
Half his home had been destroyed, but like an optimist who sees the glass half full, the 42-year-old doctor focused on the half of his house left intact by Hurricane Katrina: High above the floodwater, the craftsman-style house's second story had survived the storm unscathed.
Even without electricity, gas or hot water, it's still "my home," Thompson said - and so he moved back in, joining the ranks of self-proclaimed "homesteaders," who are bravely resettling a new urban frontier: The second stories of their hurricane-ravaged homes.
While 80 percent of the city flooded when New Orleans' levees broke after Katrina, many streets were submerged in only a few feet water - enough to destroy a house's first floor, but not enough to harm the second.
In the city's middle-class neighborhoods, where houses are often two and three stories tall, a culture of second-story living is quietly emerging. Tired of hotels and imposing on relatives, families are returning to their partially destroyed dwellings, taking refuge above the warped wood and stripped wallboard and cocooning themselves in a world of familiarity - even if only one half of it survived.
"It's terrible being here," said Thompson, who carries a Coleman lantern from room to room to dispel the darkness. "But it's even worse being away."
Around the city, second-floor dwellers are easy to spot when night falls. High above a pitch-black street, a candle flickers at the end of one block. A few streets away, the darkness is broken by the intermittent beam of a flashlight.
"I'd like the convenience of electricity, cable TV. A hot shower would be nice, too. But I just can't inconvenience my friends anymore," said Beth Danisavich, 38, a former schoolteacher, who was the first to return to her street, a few blocks from Thompson's house.
When dusk falls, she begins lighting the 20 candles in her living room, the 10 in her kitchen and the eight in her bedroom, including one in a heavy glass jar that bears the image of a winged angel. "I need all the guardian angels I can get," she said.
Functioning in the dark, using flashlights, lanterns and candles, is by far the biggest adjustment, say those who have returned. Besides the hassle, there's the issue of fear: Before she snuffs out her candles, Danisavich places a flashlight, as well as a large kitchen knife, underneath her pillow.
Then, there's cooking.
"I didn't have a birthday cake this year," joked Thompson, who uses a Coleman stove to heat his meals. Instead of toasted bagels for breakfast, he has switched to instant oatmeal, which requires him only to boil a pot of water - the same water he then uses to make coffee.
Even in houses that have had electricity restored, cooking without a gas stove and a proper sink is a chore.
Terri Stuckey's kitchen was on the ground floor and had to be ripped out. Now, she cooks on the barbecue outside. She uses the garden hose or the upstairs bathroom sink to clean her family's dishes. She combs the local grocery store for ready-to-eat ingredients like prewashed lettuce and packets of broccoli florets.
"It's a lot of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches," said Robin Albert, 31, whose first floor stewed in the fetid water for 13 days. She had to strip the entire ground floor, including the kitchen, to the beams.
But the pull of home is strong.
"Even if there's no electricity, or no running water, home is familiar. Home is where you want to be after a big trauma. And even though home is not what it used to be, it's still home," said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, chairwoman of the urban planning department at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In Florida, after hurricanes Charley and Francis last year, residents of Polk and Osceola counties had to be removed from their homes after they tried to move back into the second floors of condemned structures, said Maurice Ramirez, co-founder of National Disaster Life Support of Florida Inc.
Writer Frank McCourt finds a certain nostalgia in second-story living. In Angela's Ashes , his memoir of growing up in an Irish slum, he says his family took refuge every winter in "Italy," their nickname for the upstairs quarters - the only part of the house left dry after winter storms flooded the first floor.
"That second floor was a wonderful adventure. It was cozy," said Malachy McCourt, the author's brother, in a telephone interview from his home in New York. "But at the same time we had this feeling of being uprooted - and also of being cold and of having to come back down to the real world."
In Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, Lynn Shirer's life is similarly disjointed.
She falls asleep in her king-size, wrought-iron bed. The light comes in through a large, airy window, muted by gauze curtains. A Monet print hangs on the wall.
"You can close the door and not think about it - until you go downstairs and then you're in it again," said Bobby Shirer, her husband.
Come morning, the couple pad down the spiral staircase and re-enter the world of destruction they're trying to patch: Walls are stripped to the studs on the bottom floor of the elegant Georgian. The wood floors, bloated with floodwater, have been ripped out. Like a burial shroud, a blue tarp covers their ruined furniture.
"But at least we had a home to come back to," said Lynn Shirer.