I love New Orleans weather in January.  Yesterday it was windy and wet with a tornado warning.  Today it’s all sunny blue skies with just the right nip in the air.  I took Willow home today rather than St. Charles and was surprised by how much has actually changed in the last month.  Those stilts on Willow and Nashville?  There’s finally a house going up on top of them.  There are new–and necessary–demolition projects going on past Napoleon.  Thing is, when the resources and the will are there, this city can surely get things done.  But the getting done often looks a little bit ugly.  For example, I stopped to snap a picture of this abandoned washing machine at Soniat and Willow.  Now, I’m sure this washer has either reached the end of its useful life or is part of the detritus of a rebuilding project.  It’s presence on the street may well be a sign of progress for somebody’s house or family.  Or it could be abandoned but not replaced, another piece of broken-down infrastructure.  Who knows.  I realized, though, when zipping by (I had to turn around and go back to get this pictured), that in other places I’ve lived, this sidewalk washing machine might have been a notable anomaly.  But here I’m just used to seeing furniture, cardboard boxes, toys, appliances, and all sundry household trash left out.  It takes a bit for it to become something I actually see when riding my bike around.  It’s amazing how quickly eyes adjust to normals; perhaps this is why stagnation sets in so quickly.  But anyway, whose responsibility does this washer become?  Where do the material signs of our de/reconstruction go?  New Orleans has to look at its trash day in and day out in ways other cities don’t have to, though I’m not sure what difference that makes.  I wonder how long this washer is going to sit there, and I wonder how long I’ll continue to be able to see it, or if it has already faded into the background, the steady underlying hum of decay and destruction and loss that runs through this place.