“The Chandelier” is a chapter in K is for Keep, Stories of a New Orleans Family, 1891-2006, a book in progress by Berthe and Jimmy Amoss. Each chapter in K is for Keep is a story by or about someone in our family and reflects a time and place as it was or is now.

Recently included is “Through Hell and High Water” by our son Jim recounting the dramatic escape of the Times-Picayune’s courageous staff who “rode it out” in Katrina and then were trapped as the waters rose around their building in the heart of New Orleans. Through it all, they published a daily paper for which they won two Pulitzer awards.

“Serendipity” is the story of how my first picture book was accepted for publication in 1966 by the then-Tsarina of children’s books, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row.

“Poaching on the Thames” is a chapter by Jimmy who admits to illegally casting his huge, Pass Christian mullet net in that august river as we sailed blissfully through the English countryside in our own chartered river cruiser.

There is a letter written by my father on November 11, 1918 from the battlefields of WWI to his mother at home in New Orleans to let her know that when the last shots were fired , he was still alive. Another letter is from his mother to his father in 1905. She has fled a yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans with her children, my father and his sisters, and is short of cash to pay the hotel bill in Cincinnati of $2.50 a day.

At one point in our collaboration of K is for Keep, I thought to call a chapter “Wild Hurricanes We Have Known” paraphrasing the title of one of my favorite childhood books, Albert Payson Terhune’s Wild Animals I Have Known, because beginning in 1947, we have been in the middle of seven major hurricanes. One of the more harrowing took place at sea when we were on a freighter bound for Europe with three small children; another in a beach house, threatening to float off carrying me eight months pregnant with Jim. But all of those hurricanes are teacup tempests compared to Katrina, which instead of coming ashore, washed the shore away along with our home in Pass Christian, Mississippi and then tried to flood our New Orleans house and drown the whole city.

I wrote “The Chandelier” in exile after we evacuated both houses as Katrina bore down on our Gulf Coast region. “The Chandelier” recalls in words and photos the wild hurricanes we have known.