It has rained this whole weekend so far. The rain was one of the things I missed the most about South Louisiana when I lived in South Carolina.

I really do love this.

Once, on my screened-in porch in Greenville, I watched everyone run like mad from one of the 2 or 3 rainstorms we had that summer. They put grocery bags & boxes over their heads.

I went out into the street.

There’s nothing weird about that. It felt like home.

The mules that pull the wagons in the French Quarter talk to me.

I can always tell what they’re thinking when I look at their faces.

This one hates the silly flowers on his head.

He told me so.

My friends and I saw this woman in the Quarter one day when we were coming out of the Gumbo Shoppe. Her name is Big Mama Sunshine, and she reminds me of my grandmother. When we saw her she was playing an electric piano and singing to a donkey. That lace she’s wearing is a curtain.

I don’t think my grandmother ever did something like that, but if she had lived in the French Quarter she would have.

My wait at the DMV wasn’t nearly as long as I’d expected, so I didn’t get to read much. The best thing I read was this:

I tried to process it. I had wanted to come to New Orleans for a long, long time, since I was a kid, and now I was here. There were places I wanted to see… I had been fighting my own life for months, wishing things were different from how they were, and I had made a sacrifice to come to a place where I thought they would be the way I wanted them to be, and now it turned out to be different from what I had expected. I just wanted to be somewhere, for a while, where things were okay just the way they were.

And then, somehow, a switch clicked inside me, some spirit of place must have entered me, and I thought, why not declare that, as of now, things are okay just as they are? While you are here, declare things okay as they are. Take what comes.

Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters, p. 14

As soon as I learn to take what comes, you’ll be the first to know.

Anticipating a long wait at the DMV, and having forgotten my copy of “American Psycho” at the house, I bought some books today. ~american psycho might be a little dark for me right now anyway. shudder~

I really can’t be blamed for buying the books because I never seem to get out of the Quarter and when I do, I get lost. Like, for hours. But never all at once. If I am ever lost for a solid hour somebody will hear about it. Starting with my husband. ~not that it’s his fault. i’m such a bitch~

I bought “Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children,” on the recommendation of some twitter buds, “Why New Orleans Matters,” because I’ve wanted it forever, and a book about films in the French Quarter. Because I had, in the margarita-soaked days of summer, purchased a domain name on that very topic, and wanted to see what it had to say.

But I haven’t seen the inside of a Barnes and Noble since Little Rock. ~gustav~ And this morning there it was! On Manhattan. If my life is going to be a traffic hell, I ought to get at least get a whiff of the bookstore out of it, right?