June bug
06.21.2010 I am back in New Orleans. Everything from the heat to the rude neighborhood children to the aggressive mosquitoes feels familiar and home-like. That's a good feeling to get, and I've sunk into it a little bit, letting the summer tower over me like a playground. Things feel good, but it also feels w
eird for them to feel so good, and last night sitting on the impossibly perfect bridge in front of Cabrini High School (see image), with my legs dangling through the tough blue-gray triangle holes towards the bayou, staring out at the impossibly perfect sunset over impossibly perfect City Park, I cried open-mouthed for a few minutes. And not in a happy way, either, but scared, because it was all too impossibly perfect, and I just couldn't quite handle it. This is evidence to me that human beings -- or maybe just human beings named Sophie Johnson -- can't allow themselves be totally happy for very long. They'll melt like that.
But I don't feel too far off from being totally happy most of the time. For the first week we were back (I have Sam in tow, hooray!), we worked with Hannah, Derek, Bryn, Eli, and Wes to build from scratch our very first ever CHICKEN FORT [coop]! It is nearly there. We worked every day from morning until it got dark, and it's been hot, so that was delightfully uncomfortable. The soon-to-be-chickens (eight or nine, at last count), are getting big and awkward and teenagey. They nest on top of their food dish and peck around at the cardboard box they live in and make great cheeping noises through the night. In just five weeks they'll move into the AWESOME FORT we built them. We took them outside for an adventure a few days ago, and a few of them got to sit in the chicken fort. One fell asleep and the other pooped. Those are both pleasurable activities, so I trust the chickens will be happy. The garden is battling a variety of very hungry caterpillars and hissy stink bugs, which is a pain, mostly because I fall into deep moral and ethical despair over killing them. Just more evidence that I would never survive in the wild.
Then Eli went off to Farm Camp (yes, such a thing exists. If you know Eli, you know that this is among the most appropriate things for him to be doing with his life), and Derek and Hannah and Bryn and Wes (and Leah!) went to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit (more to come, I hope), and Sam and I went swimming. It was strange to slip into Lake Pontchartrain and expect the water to be cold (or at least cool) -- as it is, after all, a huge body of WATER -- and then have it feel even warmer than the hundred-degree air. But it was still exactly right. I bought us big, disgusting, pink-red slushies at the gas station afterwards, because I knew that would make it Summer For Real, and it did, because our hair dried all crispy and our tongues turned colors and we felt mutually sick and sleepy when we got home.
On Saturday we went to the Abita Springs Bicycle Festival at the UCM Museum (and OH MY GOD, what a place that is, and what a festival). It was weird and decidedly Southern, and I remembered two springs ago, when James and I went to Natchez and I experienced for the first time how the green is different down here. It really is, and it's hard to describe. You just have to be inside these southern forests. There's more yellow, and the birds sing differently, and it seems somehow wetter and more oozy. I remember as a kid thinking how organized the chaos of the Portland woods were. I was dazzled that the earth just threw things together like that -- just the right amount of moss here, and a perfect cluster of ferns there, and all those tall, tall, straight-line trees. The south is nothing like that. It's like nature just spilled a bunch of paint and leaves all over the landscape down here, and said, "That looks good. Let's leave it." The trees are absurdly large and round and they seems to laugh when it rains. The landscapes are just different. It makes my heart feel achingly enormous to love them both so much.
We picked blueberries, too, which is another Johnson family activity that screams SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER! We sweated so hard we couldn't even fill our gallon buckets to their teeming points, but it was still a LOT of blueberries. It's kind of sick that they're already almost gone. We've been eating them in fistfuls.
I feel optimistic that this is just the beginning of something about to bloom. The days are long and drawn out. I feel ready to fight for something. I feel ready to get my feet on the ground and love the world with my whole heart and mind, and to give again. There is a gentle sway to the days that has taken on the hopeful rhythm of a pendulum, and I'm looking forward to its widest swing.
Reader Comments (2)
wow you've been in new orleans for two years.
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