Austin, I love you. You are warm and strange, and you are always creating, creating.
Austin, I love you. But there's someone else. There always has been. And I couldn't get her out of my hair, even if I tried.
Beyond the flash of sequins and tease of feathers and the allure of misbehaving on Bourbon Street, Louisiana spits at local color. It's rust from her mouth into her Gulf, and how she is the deep groan of a pier settling into the murky spillway. And oh yes, Louisiana does spill. She flops into the queso, the tortillas, the fried avocados I eat here. Fat and gorgeous and sweating, she purses her cypress lips and rolls her moonshine eyes at East Texas--where don't nobody make groceries--and says a novena for your sister, the one whose husband ran off last August, the hottest damn month of the year.
Louisiana takes herself a beautiful vat of brown gulf water and serves up an etouffe. And maybe she's dirty, swampy, and alligator-eyed. Maybe the races she's winning have names like "Incarceration Rates" or "Most New Cases of Gonnorhea and Syphilis." But maybe you're just embarrassed because despite all that, she still sways her hips.
Because just beneath her surface is a glorious and profane heritage of Haitian voodoo queens, French-Catholic bacchanalia, devastating slave labor, and sweet, backwater coonasses. And if you slide on past New Orleans, into Acadiana--into Church Point and Mamou and Eunice-- for the courir, the Mardi Gras run--you'll see where they make community matter. They go door to door to door to door, asking for ingredients for a gumbo everybody shares. To every person in town, they say, "We need you. What you got that you can give? You give us an onion, a pepper, a handful of flour, and we'll turn it into something that feeds us all.
So Austin, what are you going to do when I show up at your door and ask? Cause you know I'm going to ask. I'll feed you, baby, if you answer when I call:
Donnez que'que'chose pour le Mardi Gras!
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