By the dining room window in Bob Marshall’s Mid-City home, a painted wooden statue of a one-winged baby hangs from the ceiling by thread too thin to see. The baby twirls slowly in the current of the air conditioning.
I’ve never been good at letting go. I’ve spent my entire life becoming a collector of other peoples’ things. Other peoples’ stories, their traumas, their hurt. Playing cards I’ve found abandoned in the street, every metal bauble I excavate, laying in the grass, once a rosary necklace that I carried in…
I wanted to smack my classmate Jackie’s back with my kayak paddle to clear it of the mass of mosquitoes that were sucking her blood. I’d have to ask before I could and it felt like too odd a request, might I smack your back, so I did nothing. We were at the tail end of our class’s…
If you’ve ever boated down a Louisiana bayou, you’ve seen the water hyacinth. It’s everywhere, hardy spade-shaped tubular leaves upturned, blanketing the still black waters between the cypress stags and tupelo trees, clogging up narrow passageways, catching on the plastic blades of kayak…
I dug one side of my double-bladed orange paddle into the dense weeds of Shell Bank Bayou and inched my rental kayak forward. “Just a bit further,” called our guide for the third or fourth time, from so far ahead I couldn’t tell which boat was his. In front of me, the bright reds…
It was my classmate Amie and me, going tandem in a kayak on the bayou off Old Louisiana Highway 51, paddling through the swamp to the shores of Lake Maurepas. We shoved off from a gravel bank just off the highway, paddled through broad clear channels under the highway trestle, then…
