NEW ORLEANS - I live in New Orleans. And I love it here.

AP Photo/Bill Haber Becky Bohrer, on her block in New Orleans.

Hear me out.

I left Montana and a quality of life second to none a year ago for what I considered the opportunity of a lifetime, covering the rebuilding of an iconic city. While I knew little of the New Orleans that existed before Hurricane Katrina, I knew the city's recovery was a huge story -- maybe the most important in the country -- and I couldn't wait to help tell it.

I had a steep learning curve: The first six months passed in a blur and felt like an endless Tuesday, spent singularly focused on work, on trying to understand this city and why so many houses, schools and police stations still weren't rebuilt. It seemed a coup to get someone from the mayor's office to return my calls with any regularity.

In the midst of this, I was adapting, if slowly, to a new culture. Greetings caught me by surprise, like the first time I got the European kiss-on-the-cheek hello (I'm a hand-shaker), and I had to ask a colleague for a primer on how you address people -- is it Miss first name or Miss last? And it took me some time to get over the need to bite my feminist tongue whenever I was called "honey" or "baby."

Then, out of nowhere, I got homesick. I longed for mountains, roiling rivers, rocks, even snow. I missed the rush that comes with scaling cliffs or boulders; that Christmas-morning wonder at seeing an alpine lake after a long hike of switchbacks; the way my pants froze stiff against my legs in subzero temperatures.

A run along the river and stroll through the French Quarter, where funky zydeco blares from T-shirt and souvenir shops, helped lift my spirits. Carnival hoisted them higher.

I was surprised: I'd gone into Carnival half-expecting a Girls Gone Wild-meets-Bourbon Street scene. Instead, I got an insight into that incomprehensible answer people gave whenever I asked them why they'd return to a city swallowed by water -- because it's home, they'd almost always say.

Along parade routes, people crowded around barbecues and coolers and laughed, far from their FEMA trailers and the wearing realities of life -- the violence, the frustrating delays in getting rebuilding aid, the government bureaucracy.

They were happy. I wanted to savor that image, that sense of community, that unity and joy that's all too rare in a city that measures time not in years but in terms of pre-Katrina and post-.

Life here is hard. People celebrate when a grocery store opens in a neighborhood dotted by decaying houses. Potholes and warped streets thrash tires. National Guard soldiers in camo Humvees patrol less populated parts of the city. Federal rebuilding aid has been slow to flow through the state government to the local level.

People are trying to make a go of it with hopes of creating a "better" New Orleans -- one less impoverished, safer, with better schools. Their determination is admirable, palpable. So is their frustration.

There have been signs of progress in the last year: Traffic lights tend to be more reliable, not staying stuck on red interminably, daring the impatient to look both ways and drive on through. And in some areas, like the hard-hit Lakeview neighborhood, there are tangible signs of recovery: Businesses are moving in, houses are being rebuilt and green spaces have been spiffed up, cleared of debris and garbage.

I didn't know pre-Katrina New Orleans. I didn't grow up with generations of my family nearby, surrounded by rich culture, with front-porch neighbors asking about my business as easily as they'd ask how I like the sticky-hot weather and the spontaneous bursts of music from a brass band in the Quarter.

I only get a sense of it, in the bluesy music that floats from a window as I jog by; in the neighbors who genuinely want to know how I am; in the architecture so striking it demands pausing and admiring -- even if houses close by are shuttered.

And there's no place I'd rather be right now.

Telling the city's post-Katrina story is challenging, and the responsibility I feel to it is great. I continue to learn, and to be humbled, but each day I wake knowing what we're doing is important. And that's great motivation.

I haven't seen the rat in a few days. My car policy covers flats. And I'm buying a GPS system to go along with the three new tires on my Altima.

I live in New Orleans. And I love it here.

asap contributor Becky Bohrer, a reporter in the AP's New Orleans bureau, wrote a story for asap last year about reactions to her decision to move to the city a year after Katrina hit. See it here: http://asap.ap.org/stories/822945.s.