Passage A
A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans.There lay my house，reduced to waisthigh rains, smelly and dirty.Before the trip，I’d had my car fixed.When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate.“Are you from New Orleans？”she asked.I said I was.
“No charge，” she said，and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet.The next day I went for a haircut，and the same thing happened.
As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage(抵押贷款)on our ruined house.We looked at many places, but none
