Take these broken wings
I had to drive to Bogalusa this morning and deal with some of the finishing touches concerning my mother’s grave and so I decided to take Tin to the Butterfly and Hummingbird Festival at Mizell’s Farms. It’s fall here in New Orleans but it was 96 degrees at 9:30 am as we made our way to the northshore, crossing Lake Ponchartrain over the Causeway. The Causeway is becoming an icon of death for me as I’ve crossed that bridge for my father and my mother both going to and from cemetery to services and all with too much time to myself to think.
26 miles in relative silence as Tin alternated between crying and singing, not sure how he was going to spend his day yet. I just looked at the vast water on both sides and kept to the road.
We made our stop in Bogalusa and headed to Folsom, by now the tears were advancing to trantrum hysteria until he fell asleep for twenty blissful minutes and only woke as we pulled into the farm’s gravel driveway. They had booths set up to talk about metamorphosis and hummingbirds and plants and The Nature Conservancy and the Wildlife Society and all sorts of nature lovers – only it was about 115 degrees or more by the heat index and it seemed as if someone had put valium in the drinking water.
Tin climbed up on a bench and fell off the back of it, off the deck, into the bushes but he didn’t make a peep. He was just fine. Although he cried for nearly the entire rest of the time – he cried when the woman tried to show him the parrot on her shoulder, he cried at the butterfly enclosure, he cried at the giant saucer shaped hibiscus, he cried about his hot dog, he cried about not having my water versus his water, and he cried all the way back to the truck.
Ta ra ra boom de ay we had no fun today.