Summer is...

the wall of heat inside my ovenlike car
overcome
by the sharp wave of cold that drenches my insides
when I bite into a pink sour lemon sno-ball.

With the doors flung ajar
I sit with my legs hanging out like a clumsy colt's
and let the breeze blow through, straight from the brassy blue sky.

crunch suck melt slurp ahhhhh.

Trivia

My sister (who visited last weekend--see "The Fecund Gulf") "tagged" me, which means she wants to know seven things about me that most blog readers don’t. So you get to hear them too. (ps I knew all of her 7 posted things on her blog, CrashOctopus.com--somewhere I am getting major sibling points!!)

1. I'm a nomad--I was born in Texas, grew up in Illinois, went to school in Boston and France, and have been to a good dozen other countries and 40-some states (Alabama being the latest--see the post titled Stars Fell On... on April 17). I also lived in New Orleans for a summer and now have ended up in Mississippi. It's sort of like that roulette rhyme: 'Round and 'round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows!
2. I was super-picky about the food I would eat when I was little; I ate nothing green except peas. The veggies I would eat consisted of corn, potatoes (okay, those are both starches), peas, and cooked carrots (never raw, horrors!!) with ketchup on them. Now I eat everything from alligator to rattlesnake to liver to rutabaga to spinach to borscht... my, how times have changed.
3. I used to play the piano. Key words, "used to." As in, no longer.
4. I am allergic to kitties. But not the ones I fostered, mysteriously enough...
5. I saw the movie The Notebook last night for the first time and I cried. I am a sucker for a good love story--not the sappy kind, but the kind that is a testament to the kind of love "that plants the fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds."
6. Eating whole pints of Blue Bell Ice Cream & watching YouTube videos of West Wing montages, Avril Lavigne music videos, and the guy who can play all of the original Mario Brothers soundtrack on the piano are my guilty pleasures. Okay, maybe not so guilty... I thoroughly enjoy them.
7. I like bats. There goes one now! (I think a colony lives in the live oaks in my front yard.)

Now I'm supposed to go "tag" 7 other bloggers... yeah, I know, hmm, 2 other bloggers, one of which already tagged me. But here's the link to the other blogger, my godsister Alison, who is now *it*! http://www.bluishorange.com/

The Fecund Gulf

"O God, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
it is teeming with countless creatures,
living things both small and great.

There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it."
--Psalm 104:24-25

Last weekend my sister came to visit (hurrah for lovely sisters who sacrifice their time and their money to come and see you--and as a birthday present, no less!) and it was fantastically refreshing. We ate too much, we slept in (a little), we got sunburned and bug-bitten. And we got to have those great long conversations where you find you don't have to explain yourself because all the ground work is already laid--you've known each other for so long, learned each other's habits, passions, mannerisms and endearing and/or annoying idiosyncrasies, and so the person you're talking to already gets it, gets you. It's like jumping right back into the middle of a book you haven't picked up in five months, and not having to go back and reread to catch yourself up because you know the story so well. And to think we used to fight about who crossed the invisible line in the back seat of the car...

The other thing we did last weekend was Nature. We saw and experienced so much wildlife that I told The Sis we should be getting our own Discovery Channel show. Here's a little taste:

Saturday we went to the beach armed with cameras and sunscreen and wandered out onto a dock with some kind of shorebirds perched on the end, hoping to get a shot or two (The Sister is a photographer, amongst other things).

While she was on her belly stalking these two smidgeons of birds--who, seemingly incapable of flying far enough to get safely back to shore, just kept edging closer and closer to the end of the dock until they had nowhere else to go--I was experimenting with the effect of my shadow on a school of tiny fish swimming against the current like iridescent grains of rice. Suddenly a great, beautiful heron flew almost directly over our heads. The Sister was trying to follow it with her camera as it passed us, when, lo and behold, a second heron as magnificent as the first came in to land about twenty feet away from us on our dock. Yes, we were laying low, and yes, we weren't really moving, but I was awed that such a normally skittish bird (the same species that takes off from the pond I run by in the mornings if I so much as breathe wrong) would choose to stay this close to humans. The heron (a great blue) just stood there for 10 or 15 minutes, unperturbedly grooming itself, inspecting us, and scanning the horizon for... what? Its partner? Food? Do herons just sit and veg out sometimes with no purpose other than to stand there lookin' good?

The highlight of the visit in terms of comedy was definitely the "heron pretends to be dog by scratching itself with long clawed feet" routine.

I'm a romantic, I freely admit it--but in the tradition of Native spirituality, it felt like the Heron Spirit had deigned to pay us a visit. It felt pretty special.


Next The Sister tried wading out into the water to snap a few photos of a bosomy pelican napping on a pier piling. It didn't seem to feel too enthusiastic about posing; but I got some good shots of my sister realizing she was knee-deep in saltwater holding a battery-operated device!

As she waded back out of the water, we were approached by another form of wildlife: a 2-year-old gabbling incoherently about the little crabs in the reeds--or something. Lest you think he is a little behind developmentally in terms of learning to speak intelligibly, we learned from his grandparents that he is learning to speak English and Portuguese--we just felt dumb compared to a little kid who could tell whole stories about marauding airplanes and spies in two different languages (albeit at the same time).

Later that afternoon we took it into our heads to go crabbing, an adventure which started out at the marina bait shop with a lesson from an elderly black lady who taught us how to tie a lead string onto a crabbing net like she'd been doing it her whole life--which, come to think of it, she probably has; another lady we met later that afternoon was crabbing for "groceries," as she put it. This is one way people put food on their tables down here.

Then off to the grocery store for a pack of chicken necks, one of which we tied to the sweet spot in the middle of the crab net and lowered off of the public pier (see The Pier). When lowered to the bottom, the upper ring of the net collapses flat onto the lower ring, leaving the bait innocently lying on the ocean floor, free to tantalize passing crustaceans. Every 20 minutes or so (we were told), you pull the net up and see what you've captured. Easy enough, we figured--we'll have caught enough in a few hours to give us both a few boiled crabs for dinner, no problem. Heck, let's invite the neighbors!

Four hours later, grand total of caught creatures (drumroll, please):

-1 one-clawed, midget crab too small to keep.
-1 shrimp. Which fell through the net.

Dinner was a DiGiorno's frozen pizza from Winn Dixie.

* * *

I should mention some more, well, impressive denizens of the Gulf we encountered at the Pier. A whole family was fishing and crabbing at the very end of the pier, and amidst the shrieks and laughter and the sound of aluminum can tabs snapping open, we heard a pre-teen voice squeal "It's a dolphin! Look, a DOLphin!!!!" It was, in fact, 3 dolphins (species unclear)--a mother and a baby swimming cheek-to-cheek, so to speak, and a third animal (Dad? Mom's BFF? Godparent?) swimming a distance away. They came within, what, a quarter of a mile of the pier? and then moved back out again, staying in the area for quite a while. We saw them from the bay bridge the next day, as well; because they stayed in the same place for two days running, and because the mother and baby were swimming so close together, we hypothesized that Momma had just had the baby and was sticking in a sheltered spot to help it get used to swimming on its own. I'd never seen a dolphin in the bay before--I'm sure it happens all the time, but all the same, the cetacean sighting along with the heron visit conspired to make me feel we were having an enchanted day, despite the crab fiasco! (I've since been informed, by the way, that crabbing at the public pier probably did it--it's overcrabbed. Next time, The Sis and I will be heading out to the Gulf to a less popular spot to get us some crawly critters for dinnah.)

The next day we borrowed a friend's kayak and hit the wetlands. I am proud to say that it took us almost no time at all before we were smoothly gliding through the water, paddles synchronized in a glowing example of sibling solidarity... well, minus the numerous times I though The Sister needed some help turning and I added my own back-paddling or braking, thus throwing off her careful calculations about how much reverse thrust would be needed to bank a turn. I couldn't resist--I was just trying to help!

But seriously, we executed some sweet maneuvers, including reverse paddling and three-point turns, and we only got stuck once--in someone's front yard! I was unaware that private individuals have docks leading from their houses out into the wetlands, and that, even if you are inadvertently intruding into their "lawn," they will wave enthusiastically and walk all the way to the end of their dock laden with Cokes and cups of ice to cool you down from the hot hot sun. Now THAT is Southern Hospitality!

Aside from mastering the art of the kayak--which can be really euphoric when you get a good, coordinated pace going and find yourself slicing cleanly through the water--the rest of the experience was rather Alice-in-Wonderland. Kayaks sit so low in the water that you end up at eye-level with the reeds and the mud, and the red-winged blackbirds squawking at you that you're invading their territory are actually perched menacingly close above your head, so that you feel they may indeed have the upper hand and it would be best not to incur their wrath. This circumstance also allows you to drift in close enough to observe the minuscule crabs burrowing into the mud anchored by the waving grasses of this water-prairie. At times, the blackbirds and the great blue heron which buzzed our watery foxhole (the same which starred in yesterday's dockside drama??) actually made me feel I was traveling through a rolling Illinois grassland.

The labyrinthine* channels leading off of the main waterway are so precise that you wonder if they weren't laid out by humans hands. Every twist and turn as you navigate their meandering corridors is a surprise; once we turned a corner a bit too quickly and surprised an alligator out of its nest, right into the water beside us. Alligators move fast, so fast that my sister missed the whole thing because my head was in her way (I was sitting in the front). This capacity for speed, coupled with the fact that we were now sitting in a very low-slung plastic shell (which no longer seemed very sturdy) in opaque brown water concealing the whereabouts of a creature whose bite PSI** can be comparable to that of having a small pick-up truck dropped on you evoked a response that can be best summarized by the word:

PADDLE!!!!

We saw neither hide nor claw of this superb predator after it slipped into the water, fortunately--just a whole lot of fish jumping and flopping out of the water (trying to escape alligators?? Trying to grab an insectual snack?), a small <--- green heron (they're about 18 inches in body length), and a whole lot of boaters destroying the wetlands by going so fast through the main channel that their wake violently slammed the fragile reed-laced mud, thus carelessly washing away vital habitat. I felt like painting a gigantic NO WAKE sign in red letters on white plywood and installing it in a prominent location in the marina, perhaps under cover of nightfall in some sort of eco-guerilla action--hmmm, it's dark out now...where do we keep the spray paint?

This intimate tour of an unfamiliar ecosystem was like getting to peer at a Caravaggio up close; maybe beforehand you had a vague notion that the painting was a masterpiece, but you had never really looked at it that carefully. I'd heard how magnificent and ecologically vital the wetlands are; but now, I've stood nose-to-nose with the brushstrokes and discovered for myself this magical world teeming with incredible life, an entire network of organisms that, from afar, only looks like a lot of grass and water--pretty, but unanimated. Ah, how very artful is Mother Nature!

*awesome word, no?

**http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/alligator.html

1 dead in attic

Some days, it hits you harder than others. Like the days when you just happen to glance up as you drive to the post office to buy 2 cent stamps because you neglected to mail something important before the rate increase, and a two-story metal skeleton sprouting through the tree tops claws across your vision with its twisted, naked steel beams. Or the days when you're driving a couple of volunteers to work sites along the Gulf Coast highway, and for no apparent reason you start to count the number of barren lots marked only by empty metal signs and weeds and you lose count after 50. You get good at guessing what used to be in a particular spot, places where formerly lively establishments have been rendered bleakly anonymous but for a telltale row of gas pumps, a half-legible Olive Garden sign, or a set of front porch steps leading nowhere.

A few nights ago a volunteer group asked me to lead them on a "tour" of the town--it was already pitch black, so the only place I could think to go that was well-lit (besides the casinos, of course) was the local Katrina memorial, where a stark granite wall marks the height of the storm surge, and a collage made from artifacts locals found in the wreckage of their homes sits under floodlights. It's continuously illuminated in a way that reminds me of a war monument or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In a way it's both, I guess--350 some people died in the storm, and almost 20 months after she hit they still haven't identified all the bodies.

We walked around the memorial, peering at Little League trophies and battered silverware and rosaries and a silver "Most Likely To Be Missed" plaque from a high school class circa 1970; we then crossed the street over to our van, which was parked in the shadow of a multi-storied apartment complex that looks perfectly normal until you realize that the entire first floor has been erased.

Once back in our vehicle, we drove a few blocks east to an Episcopal church just off the water; like a cow carcass set upon by piranhas, the structure was picked completely clean by the immense wall of water that swept the coast that day. The surrounding property is one big mess of debris and brush, fallen trees and stubborn stumps and prickly, crackly vegetation, and out of it rise the rusted, dully red legs of a giant spidery sculpture, obscenely splayed like a tragicomic parody of the fiery orange Calder Flamingo in downtown Chicago. These metal beams are all that's left of a once graceful sanctuary built in 1969 after Hurricane Camille destroyed the original church building in 1969--talk about bad luck. Its congregation had chosen to rebuild in the same spot that first time because they were inspired, I suppose, by its proximity to water, that holiest of elements. This time, not without heavy hearts, they're relocating north of the interstate, a good 3 or 4 miles away.

It's in those moments--when you find yourself scrambling over the implacable rubble of a church, or when you notice that that piece of plastic ground into the dirt next to you as you cut across someone's lawn is an orphaned hairbrush, barely recognizable; when you feel the sky go grey and the wind pick up and the lightning dance a little jig across the tree tops and you're reminded in no uncertain terms that you now live in Hurricane Country; when you read a heart-wrenching Chris Rose* column about New Orleans struggling to revive itself after the storm and it socks you in the solar plexus because it is so real and because you know that so many houses sit empty, still--that's when you know, in your bones, why you're down here.

PS. A huge THANK YOU to all who participated in last Saturday's nation-wide Stamp Out Hunger US Postal Service food drive! Our food pantry was the recipient of over two mail trucks full of cans and dry goods, and although our caseworker was a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of food--I don't think any of us had ever seen so many cans of potted meat--we were all thrilled to have so much food to distribute to our clients. Well done postal customers!!

*Chris Rose is a stellar Times-Picayune columnist who returned to the city literally hours after the storm to report on the devastation and whose writings acted as a lifeline for many exiled New Orleanians longing for news of home in Katrina's aftermath. A book of his collected post-Katrina columns, 1 dead in attic, is phenomenal; it is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand (as much as it is possible for someone who didn't live through it) what the city and the people that love her went through. http://www.chrisrosebooks.com/

Attack of the Kitties!

Yesterday a delegation of workcampers talking in baby voices knocked on my door at 7am. I couldn't figure out why they were leading a troupe of small children over to my trailer on a Saturday morning (a belated Easter egg hunt?), but I rolled out of my bed/shelf (watch your head!), threw on some clothes and peeked out from behind my door into the blinding sunlight. They offered profuse apologies for waking me up early on my day off (let's face it, I don't have days off; pretending otherwise is just setting myself up for disappointment), then handed me a basket of cats. 4 mewling kittens, to be exact, black as coal dust, and outrageously eager to escape their yellow plastic laundry container-turned-conveyance.

The workcampers were late to catch their flight in New Orleans--what a parting gift!--, so into the trailer came the kittens, out came all my books from the cardboard box they'd been inhabiting for the last 2 months, into the box went the kittens, off of the rack came my towel, onto the towel went the kitties, and, kittens contained, over to the workcamper trailers I went to find their mama, whom the workcampers informed me was not doing well.

Indeed, she was sprawled, unable to move, next to a tupperware container full of milk; her mouth was dribbling reddish fluid into the milk, creating little pink coagulations that drifted aimlessly across the milk's white surface. Using rubber gloves from the volunteer trailer kitchen, I put her in the yellow laundry basket with a handtowel for comfort and trucked her over to my RV so I could keep an eye on her.

Next I thought it would be smart to pile all the cats involved into my car and drive three blocks to the animal shelter billboard advertising free spaying and neutering that I pass on my daily run (it pays to be observant--this is also how I know where the thrift store is, how much gas prices change overnight [a lot], and where to find SkiDoos for rent--in the abandoned parking lot next to the cemetery). I called the posted number, called another number, and got a nice lady on the phone who told me how to concoct a little number I like to call Kitten Ambrosia: 4 oz. evaporated milk + 4 oz. Karo syrup + 4 oz. water + an egg yolk (sorry vegans) = kitty bliss. I made a quick run to the grocery store (thank God the Food Tiger is open at 7:30am) for the ingredients, a baby bottle--which the store clerk, bless her heart, thought was for a "bouncing baby girl", which I most emphatically informed here it was NOT; but in a spirit of goodwill she wished me an early Happy Mothers Day anyway--some flea ointment, a litter box, litter, and scooper; and then I went home and got down to business.

Sad to say, Mama Cat expired while I was doctoring her babies. I'm not overly sentimental about animals, but I like to think that once she saw someone caring for her kittens--once they stopped screeching with every millimeter of their tiny feline larynxes at the indignity of not being fed every hour, on the hour, and started eating--she felt like she could depart this world for the great pet cemetery in the sky. Ignominiously, I had to put her in a plastic bag and dispose of her in the trash bin, because animal control doesn't work on the weekends (since rabid raccoons decide to invade your garage only on weekdays?? Right). I said a little blessing over her strangely limp, heavy body, and then went back to ministering to her offspring. Which, it turns out, is a full-time job.

Let's just say that--after flea meds; flea spray; slow-motion warm-water tail-to-nose dips designed to make fleas head upwards yelling "Abandon ship!" so that when they reach the nose-up end you can pick them off with a pair of tweezers, which is insanely frustrating and doesn't work; whipping up Chef Leah's new feline specialty a couple dozen (okay, two, but it feels like twenty) times a day; bottle feeding four messy drinkers who can only lap insanely small amounts of liquid, IN SLOW MOTION; spilling most of the Kitty Ambrosia on my favorite gym shorts; doing three loads of hot-water, bleach-added laundry to get kitty diarrhea off of my shirts, towels, you name it; waking up for early morning feedings; being treated to Kitty Concertos of Lament every time I want to take a shower, eat, or do anything not involving my new best friends; and acquiring a disturbing paranoia which produces phantom sensations of fleas crawling all over my body even when there is manifestly nothing there--I understand why people drown motherless kittens. I would never be able to bring myself to do it, but I see the point. Kittens were made to be raised by cats, not by people (least of all by people allergic to cats. Achoo).

But as my sister says, there is no better feeling than having 4 little feline motors curled up on your lap, purring in sync. And it's pretty cute when, crying like banshees, they frantically claw the front of your shirt and make skyward supplications with their little paws in an effort to nuzzle under your chin. Turns out that sometimes, that neurotic meowing isn't just about getting you to prepare another bottle of Liquid Kitty Crack, stat--sometimes, they just want a little lovin'. Awwww.

PS. Kitten cuteness notwithstanding, tomorrow morning they go to the nearest no-kill shelter. I'd love to adopt them, but a 7am-7pm job and the brand new carpet in the modular house I'm moving into say, emphatically, "NO."

MSNBC article

One of today's front page MSNBC.com stories is about the complete and utter lack of affordable, workforce, and/or subsidized housing on the Gulf Coast. http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com/2007/05/rentals.html

" 'Rental Katrina victims are essentially the most powerless group of all in
trying to fashion a recovery,' says Reilly Morse, an attorney with Mississippi
Center for Justice, which advocates for racial and economic justice along the
coast. 'They have to depend entirely on landowners and land developers to make
something happen.'
The loss was staggering. In a state where nearly 30 percent of the residents are renters, 72,116 renter-occupied units were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, according to Gov. Haley Barbour’s office."

The rebuilding I'm involved with is all homeowner properties, but the direct service and emergency assistance that our organization provides serves hundreds of non-homeowners who, though they may have secured a local job, are struggling to find a place to live. The massive destruction of rental properties has caused rents on the housing that is still available to shoot through the roof, and the demolition or neglect of public housing (*ahem*, HUD!!) and other low-income housing options leaves people with little choice but to live on the streets or move away to an prohibitively expensive commute or a new locale where they have no job and know no one. The icing on the cake is the epidemic of NIMBYism--Not In My Backyard attitudes--that has hit the Gulf Coast. One local city council even went so far as to pass a resolution barring all projects funded by income tax credits (shelters, affordable or public housing, prisons, etc.), because, as one city official put it, they don't want "those kind of people" moving in. Please just come right out and call it what it is--ethnic and socioeconomic cleansing.

How do you support a service-industry workforce, like the one we have here at the Coast's many casinos, without some kind of accessible, affordable housing??

A SnoBall in... May.

May 1st here on the Gulf Coast and it feels like mid-summer at home. I drove a workcamper over to the next town to meet up with her crew on their worksite, and walking into the bedroom they were working on was like walking into a completely new house. Last Friday the room was so crammed with stuff--dark furniture, a water bed, piles and piles of papers and mementos and knicknacks, the result of the hoarding that comes from nearly losing all your possessions and never wanting to get rid of the things that made it through the storm with you--that you couldn't tell what color the walls were. Now everything is cleared out, the walls shine with a bright white coat of primer, and trimming, door moulding, and light fixtures are going up. I swear, seeing something so unexpectedly transformed like that is like Christmas in... May. Not the perfect analogy if you are from up North, but remember, this is a hot, July-like May we're talking about!

And then I took the back roads--bursting with lilac, jasmine, and a zillion other flowers--over to my friend Lucious' house to drop off a cooler of his we'd used last week to transport some frozen Gulf shrimp (mmmm). On the way back to the office I decided it was so hot and I was so parched that nothing but a snoball could quench my thirst and cool me off. For those of you who haven't ventured this far south during hot months, a snoball is like a snocone, but better--the ice is crushed finer and the choice of flavors is nearly infinite. My snocone purveyor of choice in these parts is Cospo's Snoballs--and boy do they do it right. A dollar gets you an overflowing mound of finely crushed ice (the key to a good snoball is crushing the ice on site), saturated but not drowned by a syrup of your choice, including, I kid you not, Ninja Turtle. For a child of the 80s, it does not get any better than this.

Roll down the windows, turn up the country, put your pedal to the metal on the highway along the Gulf and you got yourself a little slice of heaven.