Porch nights are back
When we moved back to New Orleans in 1995, we lived on Napoleon Avenue in a half a double and had a back porch that was surrounded by night blooming jasmine and crepe myrtle. Our neighbors had a fountain that we could enjoy from across the dense leaves of a jasmine vine. Despite having arrived during a heat wave and having to unpack a van packed tight with our belongings that we dragged cross country not once but three times, we managed to sit outside nearly every night for about ten months.
We had dinner or drinks or cigars or just coffee out back in that small yard, sitting there in that lush outdoor room, the weather, the feeling, the whole package was ideal.
Narrator: It was an unusual time – San Francisco was a distant memory that was beckoning Steve back to architectural glory, New Orleans was a changed landscape of friends gone distant and family gone nuts.
In the backdrop of our New Orleans story, on the West Coast, a dot.com subterfuge was tuning up and playing out – the likes of which folks my age have never seen (aside: though our relatives had back in the roaring 20s).
Fast forward, we returned to San Francisco in 1996 and experienced the hay day of financial gluttony gone mad and then years later, we came back again to New Orleans, in 2005, and I spent the next couple of years trapped like a rat in the American Can Company because of Katrina, still longing to sit outside in the warm sultry evening that only the South seems to offer.
So, I planted night blooming jasmine by the screen porch so the nights would be heady again and now finally, last night, we sat out back with friends and had dinner, conversation, and wine and the decade or so period of time that came in between those nights on Napoleon and the nights here at the LaLa fell away.
Narrator: But not so subtly in the background, the shenanigans on Wall Street had come undone and a din chorus of powerful men’s voices buzzed like flies circling a raw piece of meat – and we sat like young maggots on a discarded heap of trash, our insides in a constant state of agitation against the hum of white noise.