Month: January 2020

New Orleans January

As I sat in Audobon Park admiring a live oak tree by a charming bridge, a group gathered–a woman wearing a chiffon skirt and carrying a white bouquet in a Mason jar, a handsome, nervous-looking man in a slim suit, a few friends.. A very informal wedding. They were from Florida, they told me when they came over to ask if I had taken any pictures they could have. As I Air Dropped a few photos, they told me they picked the spot because it was pretty and free. The groom was in the military, about to be deployed.
New Orleans early spring flowers are blooming
The Martin Luther King Day march featured many marching bands, dancers, and organizations. It was joyous and energetic and political. New Orleans knows how to put on a parade.

New Orleans home

We moved into our sweet little shotgun cottage not far from the Mississippi and Audobon Park and Magazine St.

Here’s the front of our little house.

Right away we visited the Tree of Life–the live oak planted in 1740 and now covered in Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. We found it bike riding around last year in Audobon Park.

See Steve under there?

We’ve had an oyster po’ boy, a cup of gumbo, a root beer snowball from Sno-LA.

Tybee Island

I’m going backwards–before we headed west to Alabama, we stopped outside of Savannah, Georgia, at Tybee Island. It looked like an appealing off-season spot to get an inexpensive room with an ocean view to watch a couple of rainy days go by. 

It was. Under cloudy skies, we watched the MLK parade.

It was a cheery 15-minute parade. Marchers gave us candy.

Tybee has an endearing and proud shabbiness, though there are many neat little cottages and modestly sized hotels and apartments.

We had a full moon while we were there, and the clouds parted long enough for us to see it and have our moon kiss. (Sorry, it’s the sappy thing we do.)

I ate crab legs at the Stingray with lessons from the waitress who really put some body English into the instructions. It was inspirational, and I cleaned the hell out of the shells. Crack, wiggle, pick.

They are replenishing their beach with dredging. Opinions on beach dredging?

The gulls liked it, flocking all around the fountain of sandy water being dredged from the distant sea.

Montgomery

Each of the steel monuments represents a county where there were lynchings. This is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the lynching memorial, in Montgomery, Alabama, opened in 2018. There are 800 steel posts etched with the names of the victims, 4,400 people in all. In this section, the monuments hang from the ceiling, heavy, forbidding, heartbreaking, beautiful.

Here is one of the life-size sculptures by Dana King of three women, a tribute to those who sustained the momentous Montgomery bus boycott.

We stopped in Montgomery specifically to see the memorial. We found a small, Southern city with a fabulous civil rights history proudly on display but also chilling–for instance, a historical marker for the place where slaves were warehoused, literally, between slave auctions.

Here’s a link to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice website.

Yes, it is worth a trip to Montgomery. Bonus for a visit: fried catfish with cheese grits at Central Restaurant downtown. Steve’s bonus: the local AA baseball team is called the Biscuits, and he got a hat.

Southern Meander

The long way to New Orleans from New York. First night, Chincoteague Island in Virginia, just over five hours from New York.

Wild ponies roam the National Wildlife Refuge. I met this one with four others on a dawn walk. There were geese, ducks, gulls, a lighthouse and no people.
Here’s the progression of the day, flurries in New Jersey, driving driving, a quiet island not Manhattan in January.

Refuge Inn, great place to stay, right by causeway to the island. Bill’s Prime on Main Street, great place to eat.