Do You Know What It Means...

'French Quarter Corner' - original by me available on the etsy store

“If I could put my finger on it, I’d bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it — the climate, the smells. It’s the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there’s an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.” – John Goodman, Los Angeles Times, 2010

  As we slog our way into February here and the color continues to leech out of my outside world I begin to miss the vibrancy,color, people,and sounds of New Orleans. Its Carnival there right now- the last big weekend before Fat Tuesday (on the 9th this year) and my Face Book  feed is filled with my friends catching cool swag at parades, lucky recipients of Muses Shoes and signed posters from Terrance Osborne. I look through these images with two hearts- one that is happy and excited for those that are there enjoying the sights and sounds and one that is insanely sad and jealous that I am not.  I don't like being or feeling petty so I try to keep that second heart of mine on the straight and narrow lol. 

  To occupy myself I have plotted and schemed on how to get back there for a couple of days in May. I have haunted Travelocity and Booking.com for affordable get a ways but its looking fairly dismal right now due to a very slow winter work-wise.  Once summer hits, of course, I will be so busy that I won't be able to think of moving outside of the county- and I will welcome that, truly.  But for now I amuse myself by plotting imaginary escapes to my Nola, painting with bright colors and working my yoga practice all the while willing myself to The Stoop to watch and comment on the never-ending parade of characters that wander past; to Jackson Square where the art hangs like so many tropical flowers and street musicians play at dusk. I walk City Park in my dreams and stand under The Singing Oak while black swans glide past. All the while the sky in my outward reality is gun metal gray and the snows continue to muffle all sound and snuff out the colors.

The Stoop - in a private collection

“A part of New Orleans’ beauty is that she is a place where many people, stifled elsewhere, feel safe to be themselves: just safe to be. Whether or not we agree with their politics, life choices, or diets, they are “their business.” Of course, being the nosy door-poppers we are, we talk about those choices, just a little, just sometimes.” – Quo Vadis Gex Breaux