I grew up in southern Louisiana. New Orleans is a city I know and love, and I have always secretly wanted to live there when I'm old (if it ever gets over its crime problem). Although "New Orleans is a city where people go to retire, even in their twenties." The beautiful other-worldly place has been flooded and trashed by Hurricane Katrina and will take a long, long time to recover.
I keep thinking of all the poisonous snakes. Snakes can swim, and they need a place to go, so the flooded houses will be full of them. Louisiana has more poisonous snakes than any other part of the U.S. Last year my uncle killed a coral snake in his back yard. They have become rather rare, and he said it was beautiful and that he hated to do it. My father had a special snake mound in our back yard to bury the ones he killed. Once every few months he would have to come running with a shovel when he heard one of us screaming. Once I reached out my hand to pick a beautiful camellia, only to notice at the last second that a snake on the branch behind it was about to strike me.
One of my uncles has a duck-hunting camp in the marsh. Many are the stories told about the camp and I have begged him to let me go out there. Each time he would make an excuse like, "There's no bathroom." Finally, to get rid of me, he said, "When we come back to the camp in the spring, there are snake skins in all the pots and pans."
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It is the Rentreé. I remember how that word puzzled me when I was a student reading the French Elle magazine. It had an air of excitement about it that I didn't understand. Now I've been here so long that I find myself surprised that people in the States are actually at work or in school in mid-August, when in France, literally one-third or so of the whole country is on holiday. In my neighborhood, it's more like 90%. Literally, out of the ten apartments in our building, there was no one here in August. Even the concierge went on vacation and had to find a replacement for the month. All the small stores close for weeks and even the meter maids are gone for the month.
Everyone has come back to Paris now, it is the Rentreé since last weekend, and it is once more impossible to park in my neighborhood after 6 o'clock at night. When I first arrived here there was free parking on our street, and when the city put parking meters in a few years ago, there was still free parking at the edge of the city nearby. But it's all gone now. What really did it in was the great strike (excuse me, action sociale) of 1995. The metros, trains, post office, customs et j'en passe all went on strike right before Christmas for a month. That was when everyone started to drive-- although it was so slow with all the cars on the road that once I hitchhiked to the airport with a sign--and a lot of people who had been taking the metro just never went back.
A friend from Alaska was here in July and I drove him and his family out to Versailles. I got stuck behind a truck parked in the middle of the street ("Je travaille, moi!") and as I was grousing I heard his 12-year-old son ask, "Dad, what does 'double-parked' mean?"
I heard on the radio that the current license plates, which end in a two-digit number that tells your département, are going to be phased out and chronological-order ones will be phased in. No more bird-flipping when people pass a 75 (Paris) on the autoroute; no more car break-ins when an 06 (Nice and the Côte d'Azur) parks on the street in Paris. It makes me kind of sad. The other day I saw an I Love 75 bumper sticker (actually I "heart" 75") and I knew just what they meant.
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