He spends his days tending to his garden, all of it now dug up and placed in some 50 pots he keeps inside his Elbert Street home. Mostly, he waits.
Jim Wright became convinced things were changing when he heard a few weeks back about Donald Seals and his garden pots. He realized it was time for his friend to go home.
Donald Seals is 60 years old, one of more than 100 people who boarded a Frontier Airlines flight in Houston bound for a new life or simply a brief respite in Denver, just days after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans.
Volunteers of America, where Wright works, watched over them, got them jobs, a place to live, a reason to search out a future.
Only one of them remains, the rest having returned to New Orleans or to places unknown. His name is Donald Seals.
“It is time, sad as this might be for me personally, for Donald to return home,” Wright said the other day. “Maybe it was the approach of the holidays and his being all alone, but he knows now he wants to live the rest of his life in New Orleans.”
So Jim Wright is leading a private campaign to raise enough money to send the man back home to Louisiana. He is about $5,000 short.
Donald Seals is a soft-spoken, polite and gentle man. He was retired on an Army pension and a small monthly disability check when the hurricane ripped through his two- story Gentilly home.
He had lived there 20 years. There was nothing he loved better than sitting on the porch, listening to children at play.
He awoke at 7 a.m. that late August morning. By 10 a.m., his car was underwater. He and a neighbor floated by boat to Interstate 10. A bus there took them to the shelter at the Astrodome in Houston.
He was in the Astrodome when an announcement came about a free flight to Denver.
“I said, yeah, Denver sounds nice,” Seals remembered. He had never been to the city, ever.
After a brief stay at a downtown hotel, Volunteers of America and others got him his first home, “a little, itty-bitty duplex on Tennyson. It was OK. It had room for a garden,” he recalled.
He has held various jobs, mostly temporary work. Working a library job in Westminster late in October, it dawned on him. He wanted to go home.
“Colorado has been great to me,” Seals said. “But it’s lonely for me. I don’t have anyone here.”
So he dug up his garden and began making calls to New Orleans. Someone told him of a new development for seniors in Westwego, across the Mississippi from New Orleans.
Each home has a backyard, enough for a small garden plot. He sent in his application last month. They approved him days later.
The best rate Wright has found with a moving company was $6,250. Donald Seals told him he needed to take little, not even his car. His plants, he said, are the only things that have to go with him.
He has a few brothers and a sister in New Orleans, he said.
“We’ve talked about it,” he said. “We don’t have much, but if we pool what we do have together, it can help us all.
“Denver got me through the worst days of my life,” Donald Seals said. “I just think I will have a better chance at a good, second life back home.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
