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.