Bedraggled

They were stork-like in silhouette, resembling large birds with concrete limbs, roosting next to the waves. In their heyday they preened themselves and dipped their beaks in the Gulf -- now, they chirrup slowly, shedding their dampened plumage – still staring towards Mexico.

We walked on cooling pavement through the abandoned nests, as one voice praised the local cuisine – hysteric combinations of Cajun spices and seafood gumbo. Each curving slope revealed another house-that-was-a-home – hobbling knobby-kneed and gangly amidst scattered palm trees and vacant lots. Allowing my stomach’s fantasies to sneak into reality, I imagined bland bread and yogurt that wouldn’t burn my tongue, glasses of milk dancing among the relics.

They swept a stark contrast to the houses in the Garden District. Closer to town everything was covered in green – ivy draped in curtains, orchids, gardenias, big pointy nameless trees with leaves concentrated at the top – they were confused and upside down. I’d never seen so many vertical colors in one place, such tall windows in tall rooms – to let the heat rise – such covered balconies and wrought iron.

But out here, these houses were beasts of a different nature entirely. Unadorned with leaves and trellises, they simply stared down the waves, daring them to rise again and sweep their swollen joints from under them. Vacant window-eyes glazed over us as we trooped past and submerged ourselves in the sandy Gulf.

Standing in the pooling waves, my heatstroke brain reflected that the water flowing down my shins, pooling around my ankles, that water was the same that tore down these roofs, flooded that majestic flooring. The water from my bathtub, from my ice tea, from the public pool, that was the water which by some mysterious rationale of nature was sucked upwards in a million tiny dots and re-exploded across the Gulf to drown these defeated mansions.

On the car ride back, I watched the liquefying sun melt into the tide, the salt water drying on my heels. As an afterthought, I pulled out my camera, hoping, I believe, to capture the stork-legged beauty of wreckage – but the view rejected 21st century technology and blurred my images – leaving all my tangible memories unfocused and gawking.

With my images fuzzy and desperately unfulfilling, I returned to dreaming about yogurt and sparrows, leaving the dirtied Cajun plumage for someone else’s reality.