Snow Day

Sue and I spent the day together, gazing out the windows of my little two rooms above the city, watching cars and people slide on slowly-melting ice, drinking tea and talking, laughing, humming and eating, feeling gratitude for the miracle of being together, housed and warm and healthy, all children and their progeny well and accounted for. She brought me a chunk of celadonite basaltic tuff for my rock collection, having picked it up at Pinnacles National Park: a cube of pale green rock that looks like ossified meringue.

Continuing our theme of landscape and place, I talked about New Orleans--the city I lived in longer than any other. My relationship with New Orleans started in 1968 when I was 23. I lost a child and gave birth to a child, drove a motorcycle or rode buses and worked hard at two or three low-wage jobs at a time. There my friends were revolutionary leftists and bohemians, artists and buskers, writers and academics. I finished my BA (started many years before and continued in several universities) and then did my MA, both at the University of New Orleans. I worked with community organizers and Black Panthers, with Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, with women who built a movement for women’s rights and gay rights. I left and returned many times, drawn back to the languid pace of life; the fragrance of jasmine and sweet olive, stale beer and crawfish or shrimp shells; drawn back to street musicians and jazz funerals, to the rattling streetcar down St. Charles Avenue under a canopy of live oaks; drawn back to the smell of creosote on the ferry across the Mississippi River. Old brick, wrought iron, street musicians, the Big Muddy. 

Sue has never seen New Orleans, said she’d love to see how it is now, so we flipped open the computer, looked at maps and airfares. We might be able to do it in October or November. Maybe, if Leif is at home in Ocean Springs, we might rent a car for a couple of days and go see her via Honey Island Swamp and the road along the Gulf. It’s still a pipe-dream, but it gave us something warm to dream about as we ventured out into the ice and sleet to buy some milk. 

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