Shirley found her book. This was no small miracle. Of all the things my cousin left behind when she fled New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina three months ago, the untaken book had been one of her biggest regrets.

It was no ordinary book but a family heirloom, a first edition inscribed by a famous writer of the Harlem Renaissance era who Shirley came to believe was a close relative on her mother's side, a relative born and raised in New Orleans who reinvented himself elsewhere. Shirley was on the verge of verifying the authenticity of the inscription and clarifying a long-standing family mystery when Katrina hit.

Shirley didn't know she wasn't coming back home, of course; bad as Katrina was predicted to be, she and her husband figured on returning home in three or four days, as they had in so many hurricanes past, to find things askew, storm-tossed, but more or less where they'd left them.

That didn't happen this time. Shirley lost her comfortable house in the 9th Ward first to the floodwaters, then to mold and rot. I was more heartbroken than anybody; that house was where I stayed whenever I visited, and the repository of all of its memories that I, an L.A. native, never knew firsthand.

My immediate family had decisively left the place long ago, driven out by the circumscribed opportunities for black people in the South. But though they'd left it, they'd never left it alone. And Shirley had never left it at all.

And then, suddenly, she did, and not by choice. She bore the losses well, unsentimentally. "You can replace things," she said (although not that book, and she knew it). She was resolutely philosophical, or maybe just staunchly Catholic: New Orleans was not a fit place to live, so she'd simply have to find another.

After the hurricane, Shirley went to Baton Rouge, Little Rock, Southern California, finally settling in Henderson, a close suburb of Las Vegas. When my mother told me this, I was speechless, then distraught. Las Vegas? Shirley?

For me, Shirley was the soul of family and memory, and Vegas had no soul to speak of. It was the home of last resort, a made-up, hollowed-out end place made more hollow by its spectacular, endless ephemera of glitz and gambling.

Vegas made rootless L.A. seem downright historical, and when I thought of Shirley living there, it made New Orleans seem extinct already. I could visit her, but there was no place left to visit my history.

It struck me as ironic that Vegas and New Orleans, with their reputations for debauchery and good times, are so similar on their surfaces and so utterly different underneath; the key difference is history, with the good times being an organic, cumulative response to hardship and oppression on the one hand, and the shiny, relatively instant result of corporate calculations on the other.

And it's beyond ironic that what's left standing in New Orleans is the Las Vegas-y French Quarter, the assumed epicenter of the city's "bon temps" that seems so forlorn now that the population that gave it context and fueled its singular (and profitable) contradictions is, by and large, gone.

The holidays are here now and the city is still the gaping wound it's been since August; the thought of absence is weighing on me even more heavily, like the air of New Orleans itself. But my mother phoned last week to tell me Shirley had found the book. I called her in Henderson, at the condo she's in until she and Ed move into a house next year.

She was excited, almost breathless. It turns out that before she left New Orleans for good, she had put the book on top of a bookcase in the living room and forgotten it there. The floodwater had wiped out the bottom floor of the house, upending every piece of furniture except, oddly enough, the bookcase. Ed had gone back to the city to check the property and salvage what he could, and he had come across it.

Shirley sounded not philosophical or resigned now but awestruck, moved by a bit of magic she hadn't felt in a long time. She confessed that she had been feeling entirely done with New Orleans, angered by its plans to do up Mardi Gras next year in the Quarter uptown while black people were still sleeping in their cars and driving miles to get food. Then she found the book, and with it a sense that she isn't quite finished with New Orleans after all.

"I told your mother," she remarked, "this is probably a sign."

Of what, I'm not entirely sure. But I'm cautiously optimistic that wherever she lives, history will live there too.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and writer born and raised in Los Angeles. She wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times.