Home Away From Home
I'm in New Orleans this week for a business conference. Despite a rocky beginning due to a bout of pleurisy, I'm rallying here towards the end and am really enjoying my last couple of days in this historic city.
New Orleans is one of those places I fall in love with more every time I visit. There is just something about this city that resonates with my soul. It is more than just the architecture, the music, the food, or the art. It is something in the combination of all of it: the sticky heat, the dirty, cobbled streets, the weathered, hard worn faces and the easy, slurred accents of the natives, the bawling sound of ships passing up and down the brown, rolling waters of The Mississippi. It creates a fabric, a tapestry of sensory experience that I have always responded to from somewhere deep inside myself. Like Atlanta, the first time I saw it I remembered what home felt like.
I've seen the effects of Katrina. There are whole neighborhoods missing except for the pattern of paved streets that once played host to the families that lived there. Now, it's not just the French Quarter that is full of ghosts.
Still, in spite of (and perhaps even because of) the lingering sadness, I find this place even more entrenched in my heart. There is so much soul, so much history, so much life, even in the face of perpetual hardship. It makes my heart sing with the street musicians, dance with the myriad sweaty bodies in endless neon-tinged bars, float with the curve of the river through the city's crescent-shaped bosom. It renews my spirit to be here.
New Orleans is one of those places I fall in love with more every time I visit. There is just something about this city that resonates with my soul. It is more than just the architecture, the music, the food, or the art. It is something in the combination of all of it: the sticky heat, the dirty, cobbled streets, the weathered, hard worn faces and the easy, slurred accents of the natives, the bawling sound of ships passing up and down the brown, rolling waters of The Mississippi. It creates a fabric, a tapestry of sensory experience that I have always responded to from somewhere deep inside myself. Like Atlanta, the first time I saw it I remembered what home felt like.
I've seen the effects of Katrina. There are whole neighborhoods missing except for the pattern of paved streets that once played host to the families that lived there. Now, it's not just the French Quarter that is full of ghosts.
Still, in spite of (and perhaps even because of) the lingering sadness, I find this place even more entrenched in my heart. There is so much soul, so much history, so much life, even in the face of perpetual hardship. It makes my heart sing with the street musicians, dance with the myriad sweaty bodies in endless neon-tinged bars, float with the curve of the river through the city's crescent-shaped bosom. It renews my spirit to be here.