When I was a very young child, my family lived in New Orleans. My dad worked for Jack Frost Sugar, and we moved down to Louisiana from New York for his job. Aside from some striking family snapshots (my parents dressed up for Mardi Gras, how scary is that?) the only really clear memory I have of New Orleans is of the day after a hurricane, when the palm trees were all lying down in the street.

Still I have this funny feeling that New Orleans, if not my home, was a place I carried with me. I've been trying over the past few days to remember more about it, to make my personal childhood New Orleans come into focus. Along the way, I've been thinking about what a watershed memory Hurricane Katrina will be for all the many thousands of young children who have lived through the wind and water and chaos in the Gulf states.

It's only when you are young, I think, that you really grasp in your gut how your whole world can change in one day or one night or one long string of scary hours. Just as I believe that my own kids, because they live in Washington DC and have family roots in New York City, are part of a cohort whose sense of time and place is forever marked by 9/11, the children who survived Katrina are going to find themselves in their own big club of kids for whom time divides into Before Katrina and After Katrina.

Though we say, and it is certainly true, that the loss of places and things doesn't compare to the loss of people we love, that seems to me to be a fundamentally adult view. We are always in danger of forgetting and of minimizing how important familiar places and beloved objects are to children. Which is why, along with our attention to helping displaced families find shelter, jobs, and schools, I hope we can also find time to listen to children's stories and help them capture their memories of the places they love that may never be the same.