The Move: Here in Louisiana

...I left JFK airport via in New York on Saturday afternoon, and arrived in New Orleans late Saturday afternoon. It was a good, smooth flight, though the approach to New Orleans was cloudy, first dense white clouds then dark clouds (It was impossible to see anything but clouds outside the window). It was interesting, moving below the clouds to land, to see the coast of New Orleans, the water; how there is no real protection from the water. I had expected to take a bus to Lafayette from New Orleans, but because of weather conditions--in Houston, which affected New Orleans transportation, I was told--there were no buses leaving Saturday, I could not, and did not, leave New Orleans until Sunday at mid-morning; and I arrived in Lafayette at mid-afternoon the same day. The ride to Lafayette was terrific--the Louisiana landscape is open and there is lots of water (lakes, bayous, swamps, coulees). (When I have dreamed about Louisiana, there was always a lot of water in my dreams: and the why of it was obvious to me on this trip back--after years in New York, I had wondered if remembering the small coulee behind our house was enough to inspire dreams of such water...but there is water all over Louisiana.) One of my mother's sisters, with her husband, came to pick me up from the bus depot for a drive to my mother's house. (The drive, which was fairly common when I lived here years ago, seemed long.) The landscape, I think, is beautiful...I have been here, then, since Sunday and I write this on Tuesday morning. My mother's house, a small white house with gray trimming, a fragile seven and a half room house remains standing, despite the yearly tumult of bad weather (other, apparently sturdier homes, have been more damaged), but the house has plumbing and structural problems. (In one way, the problems are small; in another way they're not--as they must be faced daily; and the required repairs remain...forbidding. My mother had saved some money, apparently a good bit of it, with the intention of purchasing another house, but the money was not saved in a fully secure place, and at some point in the last few years it was stolen: and stolen she suspects by someone she knows.)...It has been interesting to talk to my mother again, at length: she can be frustrating and irritating to talk to, but she is smart, complex, sensitive, honest, and imaginative. The awful thing is that her warnings are well-intentioned, and what she warns against can come to past. (Everything she warned me of regarding the south, before my arrival, was true. My grandmother's house, in which an aunt, who has a handicap, is living, is in great disrepair, like something out of Dickens. That is especially sad, as the house had been well-kept and was often the center of family activity.) My mother's conversation is full of digressions, full of history, personal and social history. If I ask her a question, the answer comes in at least a paragraph, sometimes more. It's fascinating--I'm not sure if I would describe this as a literary sensibility, but it's one someone like Henry James might appreciate. She tries to be kind, sometimes, by being imprecise (she can speak in euphemism, indirection--and when I mentioned that to her, and she became conscious of it, and began to speak again, she said, "Here I go, speaking in riddles again)...This morning, I thought it was sad that I had denied myself her company for so long...My idea of who my mother is has been informed by both genuine perception and great misunderstanding...I was too young to make some of the judgments I made--but what else could I have thought or done? I felt as if I had to think through so much alone (I wanted to be myself; I didn't want my life to be a continuation of the lives I saw around me)--and I couldn't be sentimental, but there are different kinds of sentimentality and rage can be a form of sentimentality too...Whatever I say, I made a mistake: a mistake in thinking, and a mistake in feeling...That I held on so long to judgments made when young, that is the worst thing...I was wounded and I was arrogant and I was foolish...[Writer's Note: Slowly, but completely by early January, I would be reminded of why I had exiled my mother to the margins of my life; she was the one from whom I learned a strategic and ultimately self-defeating cruelty; and I was surprised to learn that she had alienated others too.]

...The house is out in the country, outside of a couple of small towns and today I walked, a long walk, a two-hour walk, a walk past cane fields and very nice houses with barking dogs, and a few old farm ruins, into one of those towns, St. Martinville, which seems quaint and pretty, prettier than I remembered it being. (Have they been trying to turn it into a tourist attraction? And yet, business does not seem great.)...It's been a lovely day so far...

...The stories here are interesting too...Two (white) spinsters sisters who own a lot of property, and are taken care of by a (black) couple; and when the last sister is about to die, she and others expect her black caretaker(s) to inherit the property...and after she dies, two days before the will-reading and dissemination of the property, someone (white) comes along and claims to be the long unknown daughter of one of the spinster sisters...and gets at least half the property...Another woman (black) is burned alive, burned until death, while sitting in her chair, with her husband in her house and a younger relative having been recently nearby--and the house does not burn and no one else burns; and no one "knows" how the fire started...Southern Gothic?...