Today, after yoga class, Stephanie, the beautiful woman who once cherished my infant son while I used the gym, told me she had six relatives die in the hurricane. I stare into her high-cheek boned face and try to recall if she had ever told me she was French Creole. One of them was bitten by a poisonous snake, two were washed from their house into Lake Pontchartrain, one had a heart condition, and the last was so badly bitten by an alligator that he did not survive.
Read More“Exile is strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.” ―Edward W. Said
Read MoreI was cooking breakfast, which is odd since I don’t remember that we usually ate things that were cooked for breakfast, and I could swear neither of us ate eggs. Nevertheless, I was cooking breakfast. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen and said, “I can’t do this anymore.” I thought he meant wait for breakfast, or maybe he had started something handy, and it was backfiring like changing a light bulb or building a wall. “What?” I said, looking up from the frying pan, I remembered that frying pan, so it must have been eggs or bacon or pancakes or French toast.
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